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Sr Barbara Specht OP - Born January 30 1929, Died October 4 2025<br />
Barbara was one of three daughters born to Frances and Albert Specht. Her family reports that as they grew up, Barbara and her youngest sister, Ruth, became champion tennis players, competing at Memorial Drive and earning a reputation as formidable doubles partners.
Barbara was a gifted athlete and spent a couple of years post-school teaching physical education to primary school students and immersing herself in the science of physiotherapy.
At the age of 18, Barbara’s parents consented to her joining the Dominican community at Cabra. Her third sister, Thora, entered the Little Company of Mary.
The decision of Barbara and Thora to enter the austere realm of religious life in those days could have been seen by their parents and Ruth as grace but must surely also have been felt as a loss. Thank God that over time, the rules that made contact with families at best artificial were relaxed in favour of a view that welcomed them into religious communities and encouraged the Sisters to share in their lives as much as possible.
Barbara’s extended family took full advantage of this new era and Barbara’s close connection with the Taylor family (Ruth, Brian and their nine children) was further strengthened, enduring until Barbara’s death.
In her long years as a Dominican, Barbara knew both the austerity of her early years in religious life and then the relative freedoms of the post-Vatican 11 era. She flourished in both. She began her ministry as a primary and secondary teacher in the early 50s, moving into school leadership in the early 60s, including as sports mistress at Cabra – a role the former champion tennis player would have relished.
When full-time university study became possible, Barbara’s horizons began to expand. She remained as principal at Semaphore for six years in the late 70s and early 80s before further study at the Assumption Institute in Melbourne equipped her for parish ministry both at Glenelg and Mansfield Park.
This ministry, which gave her much life, led in time to diocesan involvement both at Pastoral Council level and then as coordinator of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.
One would expect that by then and in her mid-sixties, retirement beckoned, but not for Barbara. At the same time as she continued to explore her wonderful gifts for painting and calligraphy, she took on the role of archivist, doing pioneering work in both sorting and saving the congregation’s historical records. In the process she became a great authority on its history, sharing the insights she gained from her archival work with a congregation eager to learn.
So much for the gifts and for the work so nobly done. What of the person our community is proud to call our Sister?
When I was a young child at Our Lady of Fatima school, I remember Barbara as a rosy-cheeked, fresh-faced young nun who could run. And run she did when a student impaled his leg on the winding apparatus of a tennis post, and she somehow managed to hold and calm him until help arrived. I remember her often rescuing a couple of dripping Kiley children from the pouring rain as she drove the nuns back to Glenelg from Fatima and dropped us home on the way.
Why do these memories persist? Because the Sister Mary John of those years was the Barbara I came to know and love much later.
She was generous, kind, level-headed, possessed of a particular form of common sense that could be mistaken for resignation, but which was far from that. And she was so very funny – her droll sense of humour endeared her to all of us, and her one-liners are legendary.
Faithful to her life as a professed Dominican, she gave much to the Sisters with whom she lived and worked.
Community life offered her the friendship and the contemplative space that powered both her ministries and her spiritual life. And her community received much in return.
Over the years, we came to know something of Barbara’s questing spirit, her deep desire to explore her faith, to give it a language she could relate to, and a God who made sense.
Especially in older age and in residential care, there were times for the conversations that would enable her to play around the edges of theological ideas, enjoying the questions even if there were no definitive answers.
We are sure that now Barbara’s questing is over, she has some definitive answers, and that she knows fullness of life in the God who will undoubtedly make perfect sense.
Bernadette Kiley OP
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