In January 1958, a young West Australian fast bowler by the name of Ron Gaunt was flown into South Africa as an injury replacement for the Australian Test team.

Within a few days, the 23-year-old Gaunt made his debut in Durban, claiming figures of 2-87 in a drawn match under the captaincy of Ian Craig.

Gaunt’s story was a good one, of a strapping quick bowler with a shock of red hair, who may well have played many more games for Australia had he not been stuck behind the likes of Alan Davidson and Graham McKenzie.

“He was quick and used to swing the ball about quite nicely. Especially on the Perth wicket where he used to get a bit of pace and bounce, he was a nasty proposition for a batsman to face. He was certainly a top-rate fast bowler,” Craig told Cricinfo in 2012.

After moving to Victoria, Gaunt also made his mark in the east, notably as the longtime bowling coach for the Footscray Cricket Club. It was there he set Merv Hughes on the path to a storied career by telling the young all-rounder from Werribee that he was, in fact, a bowler.

But the true significance of Gaunt’s debut has been shrouded in a family secret for decades, only recently confirmed by DNA testing: Ron Gaunt may well have been Australia’s first Test cricketer of Indigenous heritage.

His debut came a month earlier than the sole women’s Test played by Aunty Faith Thomas at Melbourne’s Junction Oval in February 1958, and decades before Jason Gillespie took the field for Australia in Sydney in 1996.

Since then, Ash Gardner, Scott Boland and Brendan Doggett have joined the list of Indigenous Test cricketers. Boland will proudly take the field for Australia in a Test against Bangladesh in Darwin, amidst one of the nation’s largest Indigenous communities, this week.

Gaunt’s story also raises a wider question of Australian cricket, and life. How many more gifted athletes of Indigenous heritage have been part of the nation’s story in secret, because of the past strictures of the White Australia policy?

The municipality of York, about 100 kilometres east of Perth, is WA’s oldest inland town, established in 1831 after being home to the Ballardong Noongar people for thousands of years.

Because of its rich wheat farming, York was home to plenty of prosperous families, who shared the land with the Indigenous community.

In 1872, John Walkinshaw Cowan, whose brother would marry the revered social reformer and politician Edith Cowan, had a child with an unnamed Aboriginal woman. That child, Matilda Cowan, was Ron Gaunt’s grandmother.

Matilda was, by all accounts, a formidable figure. Local newspaper reports tell of how, aged 16, she took the local publican to court in York over unpaid wages and won the case. She was a landowner, and after having one child with another man, Matilda married Walter Gaunt, a local bricklayer.

Walter and Matilda raised her eldest son, Arthur, together, but also had other children, including another named Walter. After Walter junior grew up, he married Ruby Morse, and among six children Ron Gaunt was born in York in 1934.

“All this was kept a secret,” says Ron’s nephew, Dudley Gaunt. “There were laws and restrictions, and it just would’ve made their lives difficult. So they hid it away.”

The secrecy started around the time of the First World War, when two family members served, including Arthur Gaunt. When he came back from Europe, Arthur listed his mother’s heritage as Maori, the better to receive a gratitude bond of £100 for returned servicemen.

As the years went by, rumours circulated that the swarthy complexion of some children was down to Spanish ancestry, or even that someone in the family had married a Pacific Island princess. Anything but Indigenous heritage.

Much had changed in WA, and Australia, between the late 19th century and the 1930s. Intermarriage between whites and Aboriginal people was first discouraged, then virtually outlawed.

In the west, a strict policy was introduced in 1927 to ban the Indigenous community from setting foot into the “Native Prohibited Area” that broadly covered the Perth central business district and select suburbs either side of the Swan River. And in Queensland, an Aboriginal fast bowler named Eddie Gilbert was swift enough to knock the bat out of Don Bradman’s hands, but not to play for Australia.

When the Gaunt family moved from York to Perth, as Walter’s building business grew, he purchased land and built a house in a suburb called Rivervale, on the eastern bank of the Swan River. Tellingly, Rivervale was the nearest suburb on the outside of the prohibited area, which was only rescinded in 1954 – well after Ron had started playing club cricket.

Gaunt was among the most promising young fast bowlers in the country, with enough of a competitive streak to indulge in a bit of “Bodyline” bowling for WA in 1956. In a game against Queensland, umpire Colley ordered WA captain Ken Meuleman to change the field, and warned Gaunt about his bowling.

It is ironic that two of Gaunt’s three Tests were played against Apartheid South African teams – just another reminder of the complexities facing a young man of mixed race in Australia in the 1950s and ’60s.

“WA was a very harsh place for Aboriginal people,” says Ron’s niece, Jenny Ewell. “I think they wanted to avoid that, and absolutely because of Ron’s cricket.

“Ron absolutely loved playing cricket, he lived and breathed the game, and I think it would have just destroyed him had he not been able to play it. So that’s probably where it came from.”

A 17-year-old Hughes walked into training at Footscray in November 1978.

“I was a middle-order batsman who bowled maybe second or third change and then got down to Footscray and had a talk to the president, the coach, Ken Eastwood was in on the conversation as seconds captain, and Ron Gaunt was there,” Hughes says.

“I reckon I bowled three balls and Ron came down and said you don’t bat any more, you’re a bowler. He stood at the top of my mark for two or three years, just talking bowling, theories, sorting batsmen out, a whole gamut of different things.

“What he did for me was extraordinary. Without him, I would’ve gone down to Footscray and battled away as a middle-order batsman and part-time bowler. If I had said to Ron, ‘You’re kidding yourself, I’m a batsman’, I’d probably still be plugging away in Footscray thirds now...”

Gaunt, by this time nicknamed “Pappy”, would also mentor Tony Dodemaide, and was instrumental in helping the club win its inaugural first-grade premiership in 1980.

Hughes remembers Gaunt’s skill as a technical coach, plus his ability to still send down beautiful outswing in the nets. But what sticks with him is the older man’s personal touch – sports psychology before it had the name.

“You could talk to him about anything,” Hughes says. “He could pick up on if you were having a bad day or whatever, and that’s the philosophy I take with kids now. You talk to them, and it’s not just about cricket, but about school, are exams coming up? If guys aren’t concentrating on their bowling, you try to get to the bottom of it, and he used to do that beautifully.

”He knew you had the talent and if you weren’t producing at training he’d try to get to the bottom of it. He’d say, ‘Listen, you’re at training, you can leave that behind, and concentrate on your training’.”

Some earthier incentives came when Hughes and Footscray were fighting for their lives in the 1980 first-grade grand final.

“In the first XI grand final I played in my second year at Footscray, there was 10 and 11 batting, and he just said, ‘Right boys, if you can get to double figures here I’ll buy you a slab’,” Hughes remembers. “How hard do you reckon we worked to get those runs?

“If you did well, he was always there for you. It wasn’t him beating his chest, it was just him patting you on the back and saying, ’Well done’.”

Dodemaide, a couple of years younger than Hughes, can recall watching Gaunt bowl, perhaps planting a seed that led an initially front-on bowler to change his action to allow for the away swingers that netted Dodemaide 10 Test caps.

“He had the tracksuit on and was clearly well past playing age, but he went in to bowl a few balls and demonstrate what he was talking about, and he had this beautiful side-on jump and action, and it was just so smooth,” says Dodemaide, now an Australian selector. “I thought, ‘Wow, could I ever bowl like this bloke?’

“Having a couple of Test players around the club was just gold for a young kid like me. He only played a handful of Tests, but that was enough as far as we were concerned – to spend any time around someone who’d played at that level of cricket.”

None of Hughes, Dodemaide or even his fellow Footscray Test cricketer Ken Eastwoood had any idea about Gaunt’s heritage.

“I never knew that, but that’s a real feather in his cap,” Hughes says. “Times have changed for the better. I thought I spent a fair bit of time with him, but it was never mentioned. Back then he might’ve been hiding that heritage.”

There is one former teammate, Lindsay James, who has told Dodemaide that Gaunt did indeed know of his Indigenous heritage, and that the pair discussed it quietly, once, long after both had finished playing and coaching.

“I couldn’t imagine him being a fearsome fast bowler,” Dodemaide says. “He had such a gentle demeanour about him, and very generous with his time and experience.”

After retirement, Gaunt moved to the NSW Central Coast to share more time with his children, Karon and Andrew. Gaunt and their mother had divorced when Andrew was two years old.

“Once a year we used to get to see my father around Christmas time for a month, [and] then he’d have to go back to Victoria to work,” Andrew says. “But when I was around 21-22, I went and stayed with him for a few years, and that was good. He was pretty much just like a mate, he spoke like a mate and that’s how we were.

“I came back to Sydney after a couple of years, and we kept in closer contact, and, eventually, he retired up the Central Coast and I went up and stayed there for a while. But work was back here in Sydney. So I was always going up there weekly, pretty much for years.”

Sport in general, and cricket in particular, was never far away from the conversation.

“You had no choice on the TV, it was cricket when it started until it finished, then he’d go, ‘OK it’s yours now’,” Andrew recalls. “He never boasted, he never bragged, that wasn’t him. Other people who knew him would say, ‘That’s Ronnie Gaunt, he used to play for Australia’. But he’d never say that. He wouldn’t talk too much about it – what happens on tour stays on tour almost.”

If Gaunt was taciturn about his cricket achievements, his heritage was buried deeper still, remaining unknown to the family when Ron died in 2012. Eight years later, during COVID-19, Andrew’s half-sister Kellie started digging into family history. Ancestry searches were followed by DNA tests, revealing a hidden Indigenous bloodline.

“One day, out of the blue she gave me a call and said, ‘Andrew, guess what, you’ll never believe it’, and I just said, ‘Nah, get out of here’. And my other sister Karon couldn’t believe it at all.

“Then Kellie got in contact with Jenny, and she took it up and ran with it. It was a such a well-kept secret, and maybe that was a reason why. He may not have played for Australia or got the chances he did if they knew he had Indigenous background.

“I was speaking to my sisters about Jason Gillespie saying, ‘Geez, he’s supposed to be the first person of Indigenous blood to play for Australia’. I started laughing about that and going, ‘Oh man, sorry about that’.”

Ask Andrew what he might have said to his father had he known, and he pauses.

“I’d probably have said, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’” he laughs. “I’m actually quite proud or glad, it just cements that footprint in our family as a full-on Aussie. But I don’t think they looked at it like that.”

While Ron got his mother Ruby’s red hair, Andrew and Jenny are both darker in complexion. Andrew can remember, as a teenager, that Ron got them together at Martin Place in Sydney.

“I met Jenny one time when I was about 16,” he says. “Dad was in Melbourne at the time, but he came up to see us. He wanted me to go and meet my cousin, he goes, ‘Come and meet your cousin’, and Karon said, ‘What about me?’ and he says, ‘Nah, just Andrew’. I thought that was a bit odd.

“That’s the first and last time I met Jenny [who moved to the United States, where she still lives]. But I think Dad was sizing me up with her because we were both darker in complexion. That’s just my take, but my sisters Karon and Kellie thought that made sense.”

After Jenny took up the family research, she passed much of the information onto Dudley Gaunt, who still lives in WA. He has had inconclusive discussions with WA Cricket about Ron’s Indigenous heritage, and has also made attempts to contact the Ballardong Noongar community. Cricket Australia is looking into the Gaunt family story.

“We want to ensure cricket’s heritage fully reflects all those from different backgrounds who have contributed to the game,” a CA spokesman said.

“The stories provided by those exploring family ancestry is an important way to ensure the diverse backgrounds of past players is recognised.”

Dudley says the main issue in his meeting with WA Cricket was not Gaunt’s Aboriginality, “It was whether he accepted his Aboriginality, whether he told people. Did he tell people at South Perth cricket club?

“If he wouldn’t have been able to play cricket, why would he tell anyone at South Perth that he was Aboriginal? It was a different time, they parked it away, hid it and got on with their lives.”

In 2005, the former chief justice of NSW, James Spiegelman, spoke about hidden Aboriginal histories in that year’s Charles Perkins Oration.

“Let me state one undeniable fact: many, probably millions of Australians have an Aboriginal ancestor,” he said. “This should be recognised as an important bond. However, most do not know this fact about their family.

“There was a strong sense of racism involved in the suppression in thousands upon thousands of Australian families of the Aboriginal origins of one or more of their forebears. For most of our history this has been regarded as a matter to be suppressed.

“It appears to me that the process of reconciliation would be advanced by a wider recognition across the broad Australian community that the number of Australians who have Aboriginal ancestors probably amounts to millions.

“The reconciliation process cannot succeed if it is based, contrary to historical fact, solely on maintaining a rigid and categorical distinction between black and white. It will succeed if a significant proportion of those Australians of whom it is true take pride in acknowledging their roots in both communities.”

For Jenny, the secret is itself a significant part of the story.

“I was very proud to find that out myself, to think we’ve got heritage that goes back 60,000 years in Australia,” she says. “But in going back to speak to the family, I found out that the family did know, and didn’t say anything.

“I was shocked, thinking, ‘Gosh they kept it a good secret all those years’. But a lot of it might have been that they wanted to work and get on with their lives. This is my opinion – because Ron was playing cricket and very successful, they wanted that to keep going and that it wasn’t made more difficult for him.”

Andrew recalls one other comment from his father that has taken on new meaning.

“My dad used to tell me, ‘You have a whole other family in the west’,” he says. “It was a big secret, and back then I could understand it. Whereas now I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s cool’.”