Thelma Afford brings creativity of Adelaide's Ab-Intra/little theatres to costumes for state's 1936 centenary pageant

Thelma Thomas Afford and some of her costume designs for South Australia's Heritage centenary pageant, directed by Heather Gell, in 1936. The costume at left is on theme "Morse Code – Overland Telegraph".
Images courtesy state libraries of South Australia and New South Wales

Drawing on the creative, inventive and experimental influence of Adelaide’s little theatres, especially Ab-Intra Studio Theatre, in the 1930s, Thelma Thomas Afford designed a spectacular array of costumes for South Australia’s centenary pageant in 1936. She also worked on Melbourne’s centenary and Sydney sesquicentenary celebration pageants.

Born in Broken Hill in 1908 as Thelma Thomas, she moved with her parents William and Ethel to Adelaide where she attended the Presbyterian Girls' College, at Glen Osmond. She studied drawing and design and became an art teacher at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts.

In 1932-34, Thomas had acting roles, notably with avant-garde Adelaide's Ab-Intra Studio Theatre for Woman Song, The Robe of Yama, The Stained-Glass Window and The Aspen Tree in 1932. Thomas also started designing theatre costumes at the Ab-Intra Studio Theatre, with its founders Alan Harkness and Kester Baruch, and also at Adelaide Repertory Theatre, where she worked with Agnes Dobson and Robert Helpmann. In 1935, Thomas joined Ab-Intra for its last show Archway Motif, hosted by Jean Bonython in her home ballroom, before the theatre company closed. 

Thomas moved to Melbourne in 1934 for further technical college study and that year was commissioned to design for the Melbourne centenary pageant. She also was asked to design the South Australia’s centenary celebrations pageant in 1936. Thomas’s designs for the 1936 centenary event included innovative interpretations of technology as well as agricultural products and flora and fauna. With her background in the history of costume, she brought authenticity to her costume designs of significant early settlers.

Thomas met writer Max Afford when she was designing the costumes for his play Awake my Love/Colonel Light  – the Founder that won The Advertiser centenary competition and was performed at Adelaide’s Tivoli (later Her Majesty’s) Theatre in 1936. The next year, Afford was called to Sydney to work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission and Thomas also moved to Sydney to work for that city’s sequicenteneray celebrations. They married in 1938.

After her husband died in 1954, Thelma Afford returned to teaching for another 18 years. She also researched on the history of the pioneering little theatres of Adelaide. Her book, Adelaide's Little Theatres –Their Dreamers and Visionaries 1900-1940s, revisited the era when some of the Adelaide theatres were unique in Australia by anticipating later creative movements, including overseas ones. These little theatres helped form the basis of Adelaide's reputation as “the city of culture” and laid the groundwork for the later Adelaide Festival.

At her death in 1996, Thelma Afford left instructions to set up a fund with The Trust company for an annual Max Afford playwrights' award and a Thelma Afford theatre, stage, TV or film costume design award.