The Australian Dictionary of Biography says he was educated at a private school at Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, and migrated to Sydney with his family when he was 16.
Starting work as an engineering apprentice, in 1889 he sailed aboard the Conqueror, leaving the vessel at Hong Kong.
Making his way to Singapore, Morton taught at a Methodist mission school and later that year joined the staff of the Straits Times, discovering his aptitude as a journalist 'in a flash'.
On 5 August 1891 he married Louise Susan Chicherley Holloway, born in Calcutta; they moved to India where he worked on several Calcutta newspapers and became sub-editor of the Englishman. As special correspondent he accompanied the theosophist Annie Besant on her Indian tour, the wanderings of the opium commission and Sir Mortimer Durand's mission to Afghanistan.
In 1894 Morton returned to Australia and was in Sydney in 1895-96, when he began contributing to The Bulletin, before moving to Queensland to work on the Brisbane Courier. About 1898 he went to Hobart where he free-lanced and worked for the Mercury.
In 1905 he joined the Otago Daily Times, Dunedin, New Zealand, but left abruptly about 1908 and moved to Wellington. He became editor of a sixty-page monthly magazine, the Triad, and wrote most of it, under such pseudonyms as 'M', 'F. T. Monk-Orran', 'Epistemon', 'Selwyn Rider', and 'Booklander'.
The Triad, a magazine first edited by another influential writer, Charles Baeyertz, was largely devoted to reviews of literature, live performances and visual art. Its reviewers, in particular Frank Morton and Baeyertz himself, were notorious for not pulling any punches when reviewing what they considered to be sub-standard works. The Triad was published in New Zealand from 1893 until 1914, when it moved to Australia.
In Wellington Morton published Laughter and Tears: Verses of a Journalist (1908) and wrote two novels, The Angel of the Earthquake (Melbourne, 1909) and The Yacht of Dreams (London, 1911).
(Journalism. Morton. Literature.)
