The Invisibility of Lesbian Mother Families in the South Australian Premier’s Reading Challenge

This essay engages in an analysis of a selection of books from the 2011 South Australia Premier’s Reading Challenge, which centres upon a recommended reading book list from which children must select titles in order to complete the challenge. As our findings suggest, nowhere in the subsection of the list explicitly named as “ families and relationships” did there appear representations of lesbian mother-families, and indeed in the larger sample of the 4000 books on the list, only one such representation was identified. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings and provides recommendations for how this issue may be addressed.