The Catholic Leader - 7 May

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28 Humans of the Church
The Catholic Leader, May 7, 2017
Dorothy Nugent still has a spark for life at 100
By Emilie Ng
DOROTHY Nugent was a child
when she decided that people didn’t
live to 100.
A cheeky, blue-eyed resident at Holy Spirit
Carseldine, Dot found out how wrong her young
self was when on February 23 this year she had
her 100th birthday.
“Years ago when I was a kid I used to think,
nobody lives to one-hundred,” Dot said.
“Well, here I am.”
Born Dorothy Church in Brisbane in 1917 to
a Catholic mother and an Anglican father, Dot is
the eldest of five children, mother to four, grand-
mother to 16, and great-grandmother to 21.
Not only has she lived through a great turno-
ver of royalty, popes and prime ministers, she
has written to most of them too.
Dot has written to Queensland Elizabeth II,
the governor-general of Australia, an array of
politicians and, to her daughter Patricia Nutley’s
surprise, even the Pope.
“She rang up another day saying ‘I’ve written
another letter’,” Patricia said.
“She said you wouldn’t guess who to.
“I thought the only person left is the Pope, and
she said ‘Yes, I wrote to him’.”
While she may not have received a response,
Pope Francis has given Dot an apostolic blessing
for her 100th, a present organised by her neigh-
bours who aren’t Catholic.
From her writing skills and her lifestyle, it
would be hard to guess that Dot is 100.
She has never been prescribed medication ex-
cept a couple of Panadol for an arthritic knee but
found it didn’t work and stopped taking them.
Amazingly, Dot only quit driving five years
ago at 95 years old and started using a walker in
the past two years.
She talks about her extraordinary life as
though events just happened yesterday.
When it was time for Dot to start school, she
was enrolled in the local state school in Norman
Park but only stayed in the classroom for six
months.
Dot’s daughter Mary McAndrews still laughs
when she recalls the reason why she was pulled
out of school.
“Mum went to a state school for six weeks and
her mother was frightened that she was going
to become a communist or a Protestant – at five
years old,” Mary said.
So, instead of being educated by the state, Dot
was sent down the river to the Good Samaritan
Sisters who had opened up Lourdes Hill College
in Hawthorne.
“We had fun at Lourdes Hill,” she said.
“I went there all my life and I really liked it.”
Having inherited her father’s cheeky “larrikin”
personality, Dot’s school life was marked by sev-
eral comic moments with her best friend Julie.
“You had to go down past the nuns with
gloves on and all that sort of thing, and we’d
always forget our gloves,” Dot said.
“So Julie would go past with her gloves and
she’d go past the tennis court, throw them over
for me to get so I could go past the nuns with
gloves on.
“I remember one day the nun said ‘What’s that
child doing up there?’ – we couldn’t say ‘She’s
throwing the gloves over for me’.”
Sometimes Dot and her friends would just shove
one hand into their pockets but the headmaster
“woke up to that one”.
Dot returned to Lourdes Hill to celebrate a
Mass in the school’s chapel for her 100th birth-
day.
Catholic faith is an important part of Dot’s life.
“It’s sort of an anchor … I can’t explain it,”
she said. “But I like being a Catholic.”
While Dot learnt the Catholic faith from the
Good Samaritan nuns, she caught the faith from
her mother and father, who eventually converted
to Catholicism.
“He took instructions in the Catholic faith
without anyone knowing as a surprise for Mum,”
she said.
Dot became acquainted with the universal
Church when her brother, Percy Church, was
ordained a priest for the Missionaries of the
Sacred Heart.
Having a missionary priest for a brother meant
the Church family got used to welcoming stran-
gers into their house, as Fr Percy would hand out
the family’s address to missionaries flying into
Brisbane.
“And I remember one day Mum met me at the
door – I was out – and she said, ‘Look, there’s
some people here, I’ve given them their lunch – I
don’t know who they are’,” Dot said.
“I said ‘It could be Ned Kelly’.”
When Dot’s father died, the family learnt that
he would make trips to the grocery store or the
butchers and buy produce for strangers.
Dot married Eugene Patrick “Nugget” Nugent
in a flurry of back-to-back weddings at St Ste-
phen’s Cathedral on April 6, 1942 in the middle
of the Second World War.
Having seen her parents welcome strangers
into their house for a hot meal, Dot served up
plates for people who turned up at her doorstep,
including a couple of Mormon missionaries.
“I felt so sorry for them because they were
mostly from America and they were out here at
Christmas time and they have nobody,” she said.
“So they came to us for Christmas.”
Her concern for the lonely even grew into a
ministry at her Bray Park parish.
More than 40 years ago, the first priest at Bray
Park, Spiritan Father Tom Crean, asked Dot to
start an outreach in the community.
“He said, ‘Look, there is a lot of very lonely
people in this area’,” she said.
Dot rounded up a number of parishioners to
gather people “who didn’t know who their next-
door neighbour was” and started Ozanam Club
for the lonely.
The group offered morning tea, concerts,
dinners and movie nights, and opened it up
to anyone isolated in the community, whether
Catholic or atheist.
“Some people were so lonely they didn’t
know their next-door neighbour,” Dot said.
“We called it Ozanam Club because we named
it after Frederic Ozanam who is the founder of
the St Vincent de Paul Society.”
The club still runs today, but its meetings are
not allowed to start until Dot takes her seat.
While she has no secrets to living to 100, she
said having a family who loved and cared for her
was a great blessing.
“I was very lucky that I had a good family,”
Dot said. “One of them comes every day.
“I feel so sorry for people whose family don’t
bother with them.”
Dorothy
Nugent:
“Years ago
when I
was a kid
I used to
think, no-
body lives
to one-
hundred.
Well, here I
am.”
Photo:
Emil,ie Ng
Bray Park’s centenary hero