19 April 2023
We pay tribute to former South Australian nurse and the first Aboriginal Test Cricket player, Aunty Faith Thomas, who died last Saturday.
Aunty Faith 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, Thomas loved her time at Colebrook, saying she was “spoiled silly’’.
“I ended up with three wonderful mums – Sister Hyde, Sister Anna and my natural mum. I suppose I was one of the lucky ones,” she told news website Mama Mia.
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 bats from wood from the nearby dump to hit round stones they used as balls.
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.
Thomas quickly established herself as the fastest female bowler of her time, once taking six for none against Adelaide Teachers’ College.
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.
Thomas was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2019 for services to cricket and the Aboriginal 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.
She spent her most recent years in an old folks' home in Port Augusta - Wami Kata, which cares for elderly Aboriginal and Torres Street Islander people.
Vale Aunty Faith.