STORY: "Not black and white."
By Tracey Edstein.

Producing amateur theatre, cataloguing the music library of Radio Australia while enjoying its fruits, and communing with a wide variety of people from bohemians to bosses, might not seem an obvious prelude to life as a Dominican Sister. However, for Annette Dooley OP, currently of Waratah, a mosaic of “secular” experiences both postponed and prepared her for the Dominican life which has fascinated her for over fi fty years.

Annette spent her early years in Murrurundi where Dooley’s store still stands in the main street. Perhaps the two dimensions of her experience are captured in the fact that her father was one of ten children of a traditional Catholic family and her mother was an only child with a liberal appreciation of the faith. To some extent the arts was Mrs Dooley’s religion, as she had been an actress and had a great appreciation of music. When Yehudi Menuhin first visited Australia and broadcast Beethoven’s violin concerto, Mrs Dooley (who was fortunate to own a wireless) rang Annette’s music teacher, Sr Celestine RSM, and offered to leave the telephone off the hook so that Sister could enjoy the concert too.

Tragically, Mr Dooley died at 50, when younger sister Mary was only four. A move to Sydney followed where Annette was enrolled at Santa Sabina, Strathfield after an early start at St Mary’s Dominican Convent Maitland. The attraction she had begun to feel towards convent life had to be sidelined for some years, but there was no shortage of activity and experience. A period at Miss Hales’ secretarial school led to a position in the Public Service, and when her mother spotted an ad for people interested in working for the fledgling Department of External Affairs (formerly a desk in the Prime Minister’s Office!), Annette responded by transferring to Canberra.

Arriving in autumn, she was entranced, and looking back, she says, “Canberra was my university”. When External Affairs palled, a move to the ABC’s music library in Melbourne furnished a welcome classical soundtrack to working life. She had gained
writing skills by working in the journalist division of the Department of Information before drama school beckoned. A landscape of people and ideas a world away from Murrurundi provided a challenge to conventional Catholic thinking, and life was busy.

However, a chance encounter with a wise woman, who led her to a Carmelite priest, resulted in “an hour’s chat which righted the ship, and that was the big breakthrough in the faith search”. “Entering” at Maitland where she had been educated soon followed in 1951, “with a different sort of mind” thanks to all that had unfolded since the initial attraction. While her mother had reservations, she
was persuaded to set them aside and then stood by her daughter.

Over the last fifty-plus years, the tapestry of Annette’s Dominican life has included working with hearing-impaired children at Waratah and Portsea, teaching at Strathfield, Melbourne, Maitland and Tamworth, and various academic and spiritual opportunities. A highlight was a stint at the Angelicum (the Pontifical University of St Thomas) in Rome working at the “English desk”. Timothy Radcliffe OP, former Dominican Master General, said, “We need to fi nd ways of disclosing God’s beauty to our contemporaries.”

Annette Dooley OP said, “My religious life has been a search, to know God better. I wasn’t wanting God second-hand, through the theologians.” The beauty of her search is evident in the telling.

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