[1] He was inspired by seeing the play Funerals and Circuses by Arrernte playwright Roger Bennett when on a school excursion to the Adelaide Fringe Festival in 1992 and decided to study the humanities and writing.
[3] As lecturer of Communication and Literature at the University of South Australia's David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, Thomas enrolled for his PhD in Creative Writing,[1] which he completed in 2011.
The other readers were Jeanine Leane, Dub Leffler, Melissa Lucashenko, Bruce Pascoe, and Ellen van Neerven.
[8] In May 2018, Thomas began a 12-month secondment as William and Margaret Geary Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art and Material Culture at the South Australian Museum.
[9] In September 2019, he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to travel to New Zealand, the US, Canada, and Norway, "to investigate colonised people's interpretative strategies in permanent gallery displays".