Thomas Sidney Dixon

Thomas Dixon was born in Sydney, the 15th of 18 children born to Irish-English parents, who had immigrated from Liverpool in England two years earlier.

In 1959, Rupert Max Stuart was on death row awaiting execution for the murder of Mary Hattam. Stuart had already visited with a Salvation Army officer and a Lutheran pastor when Father John O’Loughlin, the Adelaide Goal's junior Catholic chaplain, met him. Stuart was not very communicative because of his limited English, which O’Loughlin mentioned to his friend, Father Tom Dixon, who lived in a presbytery in nearby Hindmarsh. As he could speak Stuart's native language, Dixon decided to visit Stuart and to help prepare him for death.

In 1956, Dixon moved to Adelaide, where he was appointed as curate for the Hindmarsh Parish that M.S.C. had begun after it had received permission from the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide.

In 1954 Dixon was reassigned to a mission that M.S.C. had founded near Alice Springs, Santa Teresa (now Ltyentye Apurte Community), to serve the Arrernte Aboriginals. Nuns ran the mission school and clinic while lay brothers worked as handymen. Dixon was responsible for the Church and learnt to speak Arrernte so that he could preach to them in their own language. He introduced not only Mass to local Aboriginals but also the cabbage to their diet. The indigenous women and children were largely permanent residents at the mission, and most of the men moved around following seasonal work. Almost all the children and many of the women were baptised as Catholics, but the men tended to be baptised Lutherans as they were more accustomed to attending the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission, 160 km (99 mi) east of Santa Teresa.

In 1949, Dixon transferred to Toowoomba, Queensland where he taught English, French and algebra at a Catholic school. At the end of the year, he was appointed to the Thursday Island mission that also served Hammond Island. There, he taught the local population, which was a mix of Australian Aboriginals, Papuans, Samoans, Filipinos, Malays and Sinhalese. On Hammond Island, Dixon designed and built a mortarless stone church with stained glass windows made from beer bottles.

Dixon had been schooled by nuns before he entered Christian Brothers College. At the age of 12, he entered a seminary of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (M.S.C.), where he eventually took his vows. In November 1941, he was appointed to run a mission in Rabaul in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. However, while he was en route Pearl Harbor was attacked, and he was instead asked to travel to Palm Island, 65 km (40 mi) north-west of Townsville, on the east coast of Queensland, to relieve an ill priest for three months. Dixon remained and taught on the island for seven years.

Thomas Sidney Dixon (1916 — 1993) was a Catholic missionary known for his work with Indigenous peoples. He took up the cause of Max Stuart, an Arrernte Aboriginal convicted of murder in 1959.