Neighbours

Don’t be confused by the outward confidence – Donna is driven by a fierce need for approval and acceptance. And most people can smell that a mile off, which means she gets neither love nor acceptance. Which makes her try that little bit too hard.

Her parents are in the middle of a toxic divorce, and they each use Donna to communicate their rage and disillusionment to the other. Donna’s father is a copper working night jobs to support the family; Donna’s mother has taken disappointment to a professional level. He lectures her; she has made a sport of outshining her, and each blames the other for what they perceive as Donna’s failings. Since early adolescence, she’s called them by their first names – it makes life easier if she thinks of them as badly behaved kids, not as her parents.

Donna's too competitive to have female friends; you can thank her mother for this. And she’s too out of control to have boyfriends. Who does that leave? No one really. So the music scene has become a home for her. And rising star Ty has become the focus of her heated dreams of love and acceptance. She can recite all the lyrics to all his songs – part of her thinks that he wrote them all for her.

This makes her sound like a train wreck. And it’s true – she’s brittle, awkward, and sometimes completely unscrupulous. But underneath that there’s a warm, vulnerable girl, loveable and charming and playful. She’s just seen too much disappointment to let anyone else know her.

After a shaky introduction to life in Erinsborough and getting a few people off side, the teens eventually warmed to the new girl in town and with their help she changed her ways and become an accepted part of the community.  Everyone loves Donna now, especially boyfriend and local football star Ringo, who developed a crush on her from the beginning, when her eyes were firmly set on musician Ty Harper. It hasn't always been smooth sailing for Donna in Ramsay Street and sometimes it seems that the past always sets out to trip her up, over and over again. 

Starting out in Erinsborough following Ty Harper around, she seemed like a weirdo-freak to all the teens and Ringo was the only one willing to give her the time of day.  When he invited her back to the Kennedy/Kinski household she started to quiz him about Rachel and then tried on one of her jackets!  Rachel walked in on this and was horrified, however Ringo assured her that Donna meant no harm.  However, some of her personal letters had also gone missing and Rachel started worrying that she was being stalked.  That feeling was confirmed the next day when Donna walked into the General Store sporting a new look, her usual blonde hair was replaced by a dark, and Rachel snapped at her, accusing her of stalking. 

A few days later a bushfire broke out, and with Donna acting so weird immediately became a suspect.  However, with Toadie's help she managed to convince the police that she wasn't the freaky person the teens believed her to be and hadn't lit the fire, she was just a messed-up girl looking for a bit of love and attention.  When school counsellor Dan Fitzgerald found out about Donna's parents and her difficulties as a child, he helped her realise that she'd always tried to win their approval and had been doing the same with other people ever since.  Grateful for the breakthrough with Dan, she asked if she could see him again, however he thought she'd developed a school-girl crush on him and insisted that she see a counsellor at her own school.  However, that was to change when the new school year started and Donna turned up to the local school in an Erinsborough School uniform, Donna-styled! 

Still causing a sensation everywhere she went, Rachel started seeing through Donna's outrageous acts and began to see that she wasn't so bad afterall and a friendship ignited and Donna was finally accepted into the gang, and into Didge's heart as well.   A bond began between the three Ramsay Street girls, Donna, Rachel and Bridget, which saw them go through all sorts of life-dramas together, helping each other along the way.  In her own, special, zany way, Donna always managed to help Rachel and Bridget shed a new light on any situation and bring things to life with her crazy plans and Donna-a-fide ways. 

As she grew closer to local football star Ringo Brown, she started a cheerleading squad for the Eastside Dingoes football team, however her overprotective (policeman) father wasn't having any of it and he after finding the two teenagers making out in the back of his police car, he dragged Ringo out and banded him from seeing his daughter again.  And Ringo dumped her!  Devastated, Donna acted out and stole her father's police car and ran away from home.  However, while driving along a country road Donna hit a dog, which was actually Nicola West's dog Bronte.  Ringo came to the scene to help her, and they took Bronte to vet Steve Parker saying they had found him injured on the side of the road, and then they convinced Lucas to fix the broken headlight so they could cover up the evidence.  But it looked like Donna was in for more trouble than she initially expected when Nicola's abandoned car showed up and her unconscious body in a gully just off the road.  Realising she'd not only hit Bronte, but Nicola as well, Donna started to panic and when Ringo told her to confess everything to her Dad, she cracked and turned on Ringo and threatened him that she'd tell her Dad that he was the one driving the car!  After some perseverence, he managed to convince her to do the right thing and tell her Dad, however Policeman Matt turned out to be dodgy and tried turning tricks to get his daughter out of trouble.  Until he got caught, and left town for a life on the run from the law. 

So, alone, Elle Robinson took pity on her and Donna soon settled in to live at the Robinsons and in Ramsay Street.  Finally, Ringo and her became girlfriend and boyfriend, and Donna started to see the signs of the normal life she had always craved.  Ringo settled her and Elle gave her stability, two things she was never lucky enough to have in her own family life.  So she stayed to deal with the ups and downs of life in Ramsay Street, with her loved ones by her side. 

However, the world collapsed in on Donna when she began an affair with Andrew Robinson, Paul's long-lost son, at Schoolie's in Queensland.  Unaware the ramifications would be so catastrophic, she was lured in by his charm, and later rekindled the affair when he showed up in Erinsborough, as Paul's son.  But that was soon to end badly when Andrew captured them making out on a computer recording and downloaded it to a disc, which fell into bad-boy Griffo's hands.  And intent on making Andrew suffer, bad-boy Griffo let the world know what had been going on between Donna and Andrew, behind Ringo's back.  

Donna's been through a lot in her life, she's been through a lot in Ramsay Street, but nothing could have prepared her for the pain she would feel after betraying reliable and dependable Ringo, the one who stuck by her from the very beginning and gave her the security and love she needed.  What will she do now that she's lost the 'love of her life'?