Lorna Myrtle Hodgkinson

Lorna Myrtle Hodgkinson (13 May 1887 – 24 March 1951) was an Australian educator and educational psychologist who worked with intellectually disabled children. She was the first woman to receive a Doctor of Education degree from Harvard University. She called out the poor system in Australia and her reputation was ruined by the minister responsible.

Early life Hodgkinson was born on 13 May 1887 in South Yarra, a suburb of Melbourne, to Ada Josephine (née Edmiston) and Albert James Hodgkinson, a sugar planter. The family lived at North Creek, the farming district immediately north of Ballina that would later become known as Lennox Head. Albert's father James Hodgkinson had come to the Richmond River in the 1860s having formerly been a squatter in Victoria; by the 1880s James and Albert together held nearly 2,000 acres in the district, including the elevated headland property that would become Lennox Head. Albert's homestead stood on a property he called "Stonyhurst". The five-acre site of the second North Creek Public School (from 1897) was resumed from the Hodgkinson family's estate, and the school that served the district until 1961 stood on land that had formed part of Lorna's childhood home. After her father's death, Lorna and her mother moved to Perth, where she studied at Perth Girls' School and began working as a student teacher in 1903. With her doctoral thesis, "A State Program for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Atypical Children in Public School Systems",

When Hodgkinson returned from Harvard to Sydney in 1922, she took up a position created for her by the NSW Department of Education: Superintendent of the Education of Mental Defectives. The Sunshine Institute was later renamed the Lorna Hodgkinson Sunshine Home,