Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Ronda Bloomfield (nee Donaldson)

Occupational Therapist 105 Australian Military Hospital

Ronda Donaldson was born in Port Adelaide on 5 January 1919 to Robert Graham Donaldson (1890-1959) and his wife Meta (nee Eschner, 1892-1963). She was the second of their three surviving children.

The family had connections with the Remark/Riverland area where Robert, a dentist, had a practice around 1920. From the 1920s, he was a successful and well-known dentist in the city of Adelaide, with a home in leafy Toorak and a yacht. In 1926 he travelled to the United States and studied dental practice there despite initial opposition from his wife who was concerned about financial security for herself and their three young children in his absence (D1913 SA1471 883986 [NAA]).

Ronda attended St Peter’s Collegiate Girls’ School in North Adelaide and was also a regular competitor in local elocution competitions in the 1920s.

After leaving school, Ronda trained as a masseuse (physiotherapist) and in November 1940 completed the three year diploma awarded by the Australian Physiotherapy Association.[1] (Marjorie Hill who later served as a physiotherapist in WW2 was a contemporary at St Peter’s.)

Ronda’s brother Donald enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in early 1941 and the following December Ronda herself joined the war effort as a masseuse/physiotherapist in the Australian Army Medical Corps and subsequently in the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service (AAMWS).

Ronda did not serve as a physiotherapist however but in a related and emerging profession, occupational therapy. The importance of occupational training and rehabilitation had emerged in WW1 as being beneficial in the short and longer term for patients with physical injuries and with ‘war neuroses’/shell shock. In 1941, there was support among Australia’s army medical services leaders for the provision of occupational therapists in military hospitals on the home front. When the acute shortage of trained therapists (3 Australia wide in 1941) presented a problem, a ‘war emergency’ course was developed to train additional personnel. This accelerated course ­– still 15 months in length – was reduced to 12 months for trained physiotherapists.[2]  

Ronda Donaldson undertook the short course in Sydney, probably at her own expense. She was one of eight who graduated in 1942. The course was extraordinary in its scope. While not required to repeat medical subjects such as anatomy, Ronda attended lectures in ‘Recreation, Games, Child Guidance, Social Service, Analysis of Occupation and Application’, undertook training in fourteen crafts ranging from weaving to marionettes, and was required to produce ‘an average of four articles of recognised standard in each Craft’. Finally, she did practical work in an orthopaedic department and a mental hospital.’[3]

Lieutenant ‘Ronnie’ Donaldson took up her appointment as occupational therapist at the newly opened 105 Military Hospital at Daw Park near Adelaide in August 1942.[4] The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Le Messurier, was supportive but his hospital had virtually no facilities for the therapist, her patients and the equipment. Repairs were made to stables and a garage on the property to house her department but the arrangement was makeshift.

Within a short time however Donaldson herself admitted to the hospital for several months, apparently with tuberculosis. In bed in an outside ward, she was photographed with the Governor General and other dignitaries on an official visit to the hospital in October 1942. The hospital’s physiotherapist took over the occupational therapy department in the interim.[5]

Donaldson was promoted to Captain. In April 1943, she married Captain Allan John Bloomfield, a dentist at 105 Military Hospital, in a ceremony at St Matthew’s Marryatville. They had been engaged since January 1941, before she enlisted. 

Captain Ronda Bloomfield was discharged from the AIF in September 1944. By then, both the hospital and its occupational rehabilitation work had expanded dramatically from its humble beginnings. The hospital had grown from 150 beds to 1000. In the three months from July to September 194, almost 400 patients had been referred for a range of treatments and diversions including handicrafts, carpentry, gardening and animal husbandry. The staff had expanded also to an occupational therapist, five technical assistants and 15 volunteer craft workers from the Australian Red Cross Society. [6] It was not easy work however: patients could be reluctant participants and resistant to directives from women, and there was considerable confusion over the responsibilities of occupational therapists, army education personnel and Red Cross workers/volunteers.[7]

Captain Ronda Bloomfield’s career as an occupational therapist was relatively brief and interrupted by illness but it was pioneering. Already a qualified physiotherapist, she qualified as South Australia’s first trained occupational therapist and she set up the occupational therapy department at 105 Military Hospital at Daw Park. She was a pioneer in a new and increasingly important professional field.

Her husband returned to civilian life and resumed his dental practice in Adelaide in 1946. He was a well known figure in his profession in South Australia and nationally and died in 1981. They had one son, Douglas.

Ronda Bloomfield died on 30 October 1982 and was cremated at Centennial Park Cemetery, Springbank, South Australia. She was 63.

[1] (Adelaide) Advertiser, 27.11.1940, p17.
[2] Cecilie Bearup, Occupational Therapists in Wartime (n.p., n.d. [c1996]), pp8-11. 
[3] Bearup, Occupational Therapists in Wartime, p92.
[4] P.M. Last, The Repat: A Biography of Repatriation General Hospital (Daw Park) and A History of Repatriation Services in South Australia (Repatriation General Hospital, Daw Parl. 1994), p130. 
[5] Advertiser, 27.10.1942, p2; P.M. Last, The Repat, p130.
[6] 105 Australian Military Hospital, Quarterly Report...ending 30 September 1944 (AWM 11/2/20).
[7] P.M. Last, The Repat, pp130, 133-34.