Eldest of seven (six sisters and one brother), I wanted to leave home and in those days a girl didn’t leave home to live somewhere else unless you were getting married.
I wanted to do nursing but my dad said it was a dirty job and didn’t want me doing it. So, I thought the best thing to do was join the Army.
I belonged to the Marching Girls Association at the time and my instructor had been in the Air Force during the war and talked me into joining the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force (WRAAF) instead.
To get into the Air Force you turned up at recruiting in Sydney, filled in forms and had to have medical and fitness tests which spread out over a period of about six months. All the time waiting to see if you have been accepted. My parents had to sign my enlistment papers back then and when Dad reluctantly signed, he didn’t think I was serious. Right up ‘til the day Mum and Dad drove me to the airport to fly to Adelaide to do ‘rookies’ [recruit school], Dad told me that he didn’t think I’d go through with it.
But primarily I went into the WRAAF to do nursing and aged 19 going on 20, I wanted a change so this was a way to do both.
Rookies wasn’t easy but looking back after it’s all over we all had a few laughs about it. There were six girls from NSW that flew into Adelaide that night and in the taxi from the airport to the base we were all laughing and carrying on. The taxi driver told us we would soon have that knocked out of us. He obviously knew more than we did at that stage.
We arrived at Edinburgh about 10 at night and shown to the ‘WRAAF-ery’ (which was what our quarters was known as), where we met our drill Sergeant! We certainly had the smiles wiped off our faces.
January 1967 was so hot in Adelaide; we were excused from marching at certain times and it was too hot to sleep. That was the year Tasmania burned.
After rookies I was posted to Point Cook in Victoria to do our nursing course and from there was posted to 6 RAAF Hospital at Laverton where we were let loose on real patients. After that I was posted to a very small base, Frognall, which was in Camberwell a suburb of Melbourne. I was sent there on light duties after an operation but as it turned out it wasn’t really light duties. Frognall housed about 300 cadets who attended RMIT [the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] in Melbourne.
Being the only medic on base most of the time, I had to be available while the cadets were on base and particularly when they were playing sport. We had a civilian Doctor who attended for about an hour each day for sick parade but apart from that I was on my own. Spent a lot of time stitching eyebrows up and ears back on after the cadets played sport. As well as inoculation parades.
I was sitting in the Airman’s Mess one weekend afternoon when one of the cooks came in to show me his cut finger. He had cut the fleshy part of his finger off and wanted me to fix it. Anyway, I took him up to medical followed by all our drinking mates to see what I could do. They all stood around taking bets on how many stitches I could fit into this wound. Then I had to stay back and clean up and sterilize what I had used (All in good drinking time). Good times were had by all, (or most).
I met my future husband at Frognall. He was posted in from Vietnam and was doing his clearances onto the base when I first met him. That night he apparently told all at the Airman’s Club that he was going to marry the girl in Medical Section. Six months later we were married. I lost him back in 2003 to cancer. We had 33 wonderful years together. We had one child, a son, who died in 2017.
The only problem with the work I was doing was the uniform. I spent all my time in the WRAAF wearing ‘drabs’: a khaki, light-brown cotton uniform which was horrible and it took a whole bottle of zippy starch to launder 3 drabs. Needless to say, everyone else looked good in their nice light blue linen uniforms that took little looking after. One day I wore my linen to work and I received a phone call from the WRAAF officer in charge. She wanted to see me in her office. I had to go back to the barracks and change my uniform. Needless to say, I didn’t wear my lovely uniform to work again.
I have no regrets joining the WRAAF and I really did enjoy it. At the time I got out to get married they had just brought out a new ruling that females could stay in the service after marriage but there was no guarantee that we would be posted to the same base together. I could have finished up in Darwin and Bruce in Melbourne. I decided on discharge instead.
Vietnam was still an issue during my years in the WRAAF but we were never sent overseas. The nursing sisters (registered nurses) belonged to a different service, the RAAF Nursing Service, and they were deployed to Vietnam but no other females were sent in those days.
I joined what was the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force (WRAAF) but in 1977 that was changed and all female personal became part of the RAAF.
This is the story of Rhonda Whiteman as told to Carla Edwards.
