Rodney Stevens

When Julie Hermansen began investigating Dyslexia 12 years ago to help her two children, she never imagined it would result in her receiving a 2025 Australia Day honour.

The humble Woombah resident was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia OAM in the General Division for her service to Community Health, particularly Dyslexia support.

Since she began her journey in 2013, Mrs Hermansen has grown the local and national profile of Dyslexia enormously through awareness campaigns, support groups, social media, and helping lobby politicians, to helping establish the Australia wide Code REaD Dyslexia Network.

This has resulted in Dyslexia, a highly genetic learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning, or decoding, how they relate to letters and words, which impacts more about 10 per-cent of the Australian population according to the Australian Dyslexia Association, gaining wider acceptance and attention.

Caused by differences in parts of the brain that process language, Dyslexia can also affect memory, organisation, timekeeping, concentration, multi-tasking and communication.

Mrs Hermansen said she began to investigate Dyslexia as she had concerns about her children after her mother, by chance, mentioned Dyslexia being in the family and she knew a relative with it.

“I found, to my dismay, that there was very little known, or being done about Dyslexia in the community, it was very misunderstood…it was a very steep learning curve for me,” she said.

“Through primary school I never had anyone suggest to me that we look at Dyslexia for our kids.”

Mrs Hermansen said she discovered that teachers had very limited training on the condition which led to a very poor understanding of what Dyslexia is and how it can easily be remediated.

“It’s the most common learning disability that there is, with at least 10 per-cent of Australian children having Dyslexia,” she said.

In 2014, Mrs Hermansen became an administrator of the Dyslexia Support Australia Facebook group, which led to her establishing the Dyslexia NSW Clarence and Northern Rivers Facebook group.

Next came the ‘My Red Letter’ Dyslexia awareness campaign.

“The idea for the My Red Letter campaign came about because Dyslexics are used to seeing a lot of red pen on their schoolwork from their teacher, so the campaign encouraged people to write letters in red to someone whom they thought could make a difference,” Mrs Hermansen said.

“We had children and adults from all around Australia writing letters to their teachers, principals and politicians asking them to understand what they were going through, and that they weren’t just being lazy.

“Through those support groups, a group of women including myself who were very passionate and were from all around the country, we began to write letters to politicians, to media, just trying to get some sort of traction.

“We weren’t getting much response so we decided we needed to form a national body and to be official, so that when we were advocating, we could say we were from an official organisation, and once that happened, we were ‘invited to the table’ a lot more.”

Meeting a Dyslexic billionaire wasn’t something, Mrs Hermansen ever thought would happen, but when her daughter posted a video she created on social media about all the well-known people around the world with Dyslexia, Sir Richard Branson was taken by her daughter’s post, sharing it on his social media then arranging to meet the family several months later in Brisbane.

In 2015, Mrs Hermansen was a founding member of the ‘Light It Red for Dyslexia’ campaign.

“We organised to light structures and monuments all around the country red during October as part of Dyslexia awareness,” she said.

“We actually lit the Yamba Lighthouse in 2016… we had big plans, someone had hired the lighting then something happened just before the day, so I put out a cry for help and some local Dyslexic blokes came forward with the lights on their pig hunting Ute and a bit of red perspex borrowed from their pool table light, and they lit the lighthouse red when the Surfing the Coldstream festival was on.”

In 2017, Mrs Hermansen was a foundation member and secretary of the national charity Code REaD Dyslexia Network, until she stepped down from the volunteer secretary position in 2024.

“Thank you, Julie, on behalf of the board, our members, and particularly the kids whose lives have been, and will be, made so much less of a struggle due to your work, either directly or indirectly,” the Code REaD Dyslexia Network posted on social media, congratulating Mrs Hermansen on the prestigious honour.

As a result of the group’s Dyslexia advocacy, Mrs Hermansen said the Year 1 Phonics Test, a critical screening method to identify Dyslexia, has been mandated in NSW and South Australian schools, with Victoria soon to follow.

“Approximately 18 months after a child starts school, they get run through a quick Phonics screen, to see if they are recognising sounds and letters and how they blend,” she said.

“It’s something that we had been lobbying for, because, by picking up that, at that point in time, you can get the right remediation going for those children.”