Sunshine Home

The Sunshine Home, run by the Sunshine Association, opened in Howrah in 1951. It provided holidays of up to three weeks to children from poor or isolated homes. The Home closed in 1980.

The Sunshine Home opened in Howrah, a suburb of Hobart, on 11 August 1951.

The Home was the idea of Margaret Reid, an infant school headmistress, and Dora Baudinet, a school nurse. They wished to establish a holiday home like the ones they had visited in New Zealand. In 1937, they formed the Sunshine Association to raise funds for the Sunshine Home. Baudinet became the driving force. As organising secretary of the Association, she was an effective fundraiser and lobbyist. Baudinet also donated 10.5 acres of the beachfront property on which the Association built the Home.

By 1943, the Association had plans for the Home but wartime shortages and restrictions delayed its construction.

A panel of two schoolteachers, one employee from the Public Health Department, and a member of the Sunshine Association chose children for the home.

According to the Mercury, 260 children had a holiday at the home during its first year. Over its lifetime, the Home gave an average of 600 children a year a holiday.

The children received dental and medical care from the state government.

John Moss visited Sunshine Home as part of his 1951 tour of child migrant institutions. However, it does not appear that Sunshine Home ever became an approved institution to receive child migrants, or that any were sent there.

The parents did not pay fees. The home managed financially through public donations and government support. Rising costs forced it to close for the first time in 1976. When the Lions Club took over the Sunshine Association in 1976, they managed to support the Sunshine Home for three years but it finally closed in 1980. In 1985, with the encouragement of the Lions Club, the Sunshine Association sold the property to Clarence Council which redeveloped it into the Howrah Sunshine Recreation Centre. It opened in 1988.

In 2013 the Sunshine Association reported that it did not have any records of the Sunshine Home.