NAIDOC Week 2020 is officially underway with celebrations being held around the country to acknowledge the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. To kick things off we thought we'd share the remarkable story of Aussie Test cricketer and nursing legend, Faith Thomas.
The first Indigenous woman ever to play sport for an Australian national team, RAH-trained nurse Faith Thomas was also, surely, one of very few women to wield the willow while eight months pregnant.
It was in 1960, her final club game, and Thomas waddled out to the pitch with her “guts sticking out …telling everyone not to hit (my belly). They bowled me slow balls, and I just stood there and hit them all over the place,” she told Cricket Australia.
Thomas was born in 1933 in the Aboriginal mission of Nepabunna in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Her mother, Ivy, was Aboriginal, her father a European migrant.
The baby girl was placed by her mother at the age of three months into the care of two missionaries at the Colebrook Aboriginal Children’s Mission in Quorn, near Port Augusta, and named after the Faith mission.
Unlike many Aboriginal children who suffered greatly during the Stolen Generation years – prised apart from their parents and people, torn between two cultures - Thomas loved her time at Colebrook, saying she was “spoiled silly’’.
“I really appreciate Mum, you know, for doing that,’’ she was quoted on mamamia.com.au.
“So, I ended up with three wonderful mums – Sister Hyde, Sister Anna and my natural mum. I suppose I was one of the lucky ones. Had I not been in Colebrook, I would’ve never had the opportunities I did have. I consider myself not stolen but chosen.”
She credits her explosive right-arm fast bowling ability to her childhood in Colebrook, where she and the other kids learnt to make their own cricket bats from wood from the nearby dump to hit round stones they used as balls. Her bowling skills were also fine-tuned from “chuckin’ rocks at galahs”.
“Kids these days have got toys, we had nothing. We lived near a creek. There were plenty of rocks and plenty of galahs in those trees,’’ she told The Guardian.
Despite being a fast bowler, she would only take about six steps before delivering an on-field rocket. “You didn’t need to take a run-up to knock a galah out of the sky,” she says. “You just picked up a rock and let it fly.”
Thomas went on to study nursing at the old RAH, where she was introduced to cricket by a colleague. After just three club games (a hat-trick in the second) she was playing for South Australia, and shortly after for her country when she opened the bowling in the Melbourne Test of the 1958 Ashes tour - the first Indigenous Test player of any gender.
After years of knocking galahs out of the sky, Thomas quickly established herself as the fastest female bowler of her time, once taking six for none against Adelaide Teachers’ College.
She recalls sending the middle stump of England captain Mary Duggan flying over her wicketkeeper’s head during a practice match at the Gabba.
“All Duggan did was sit on the pitch and laugh her head off,’’ Thomas said. “She said, ‘I’ve never seen that happen’. The wicketkeeper had caught the bail,’’ Thomas told thecricketmonthly.com
She was selected for tours of England and New Zealand but knocked them back after discovering travel was by boat - in the case of England a five-week haul over the ocean. “I thought ‘No way’, I’m an old desert person.’’
Nursing eventually took priority over sport. Thomas gave up her cricket career after just three years. She was one of the first Aboriginal nurses to graduate from the RAH (in 1954), trained as a midwife at the old Queen Vic and went on to become the state’s first Aboriginal public servant, enjoying a long, illustrious career in health and community services.
She was also in charge of the Indigenous ward at the Alice Springs hospital for two years, delivering so many babies that parents began naming their children after her.
"That's the part of my life I feel really proud about," Thomas told The Senior.
"Cricket is just a sport, but I have looked after a lot of Aboriginal people. It's really special."
“There were a lot of Faiths running around the joint,” she says. “I’d feel really good about them all being named after me.”
Thomas was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2019 for services to cricket and the Indigenous community; was an inductee into South Australian Cricket Association’s Wall of Fame; and The Faith Thomas Trophy is presented to the winner of the Adelaide Strikers’ home WBBL game against the Perth Scorchers.
The most important figure in Aboriginal sport, as a cover story in The Advertiser’s SA Weekend magazine called her, Thomas today lives in a shared room in an old folks' home in Port Augusta - Wami Kata, which cares for elderly Aboriginal and Torres Street Islander people.
While bowling was her speciality, Thomas says she’s never seen anyone bat like her Test colleague Betty Wilson.
“I can remember I was 12th man at Adelaide Oval. All the blokes were very much against women playing cricket. Don Bradman came out and he sat there and you could tell by his body language that he was out to poo-poo women’s cricket. The body language said it all,’’ Thomas told The Guardian.
“He came out and Betty was batting, and she would bat all day. She was absolutely fantastic. Everything went for four and God knows what. She literally danced around the wicket.
“Well, old Bradman was that tickled pink he was clapping. Then when Betty got out he left. Betty showed him that women could do it. He changed his mind.”
While she may have only played one Test, Thomas, like Bradman, has left an indelible mark on the game.
Ashleigh Gardner joined Faith Thomas as just the second Indigenous woman to play Test cricket for Australia in Taunton, England, in July, 2019.
"I consider myself so lucky to be in the position I'm in today and she's definitely been a trailblazer in Australian cricket.’’ Gardner told cricket.com.au.
"I think her story is almost an unknown story, not many people know about her, or realise she was the first.
"She was the first Aboriginal cricketer to get a Baggy Green and I think that's a pretty significant thing, given there's only been two more since then (Gardner and Jason Gillespie).
"She's paved the way for a lot of aspiring Indigenous cricketers."
If you are interested in finding out more about NAIDOC Week and would like to get involved with some of the planned activities go to:
https://www.naidoc.org.au/get-involved/naidoc-week-events.