Hopkins says it’s “just as important” for children of heteronormative families to be exposed to alternative family structures as it is for children of those alternative families. The book is clearly aimed at families of lesbian mums, but Hopkins and Winter always hoped it would reach a wider audience. “We both know from our experience that when you work in-house with a traditional publisher you get lots of different people involved – sales and marketing, all these kinds – and we just didn’t want that, and we didn’t have time for it.”Ĭover of Mummy and Mumma Get Married, which the authors say is Australia’s first picture book to address same-sex families. In fact, along with the time-sensitive nature of the project, it was part of the reason the pair chose to release it themselves, rather than going with a traditional publisher.
Hopkins thinks the change is for the better: “I didn’t want too much of a political agenda,” she says. “You-know-who arrived just in time,” it reads. The final page still features a man who looks suspiciously not unlike Tony Abbott, but he’s joined by a priest, a judge, the queen, and – being helicoptered in – an extended family, all there to celebrate the wedding. But as we began to think about ‘you-know-who’, it became much clearer to me that actually, while the political parties, the prime minister and those institutions of power and authority do provide obstacles, there’s also somebody in most people’s lives who is a you-know-who – it might be a father, a grandmother, an uncle. “At the beginning I was thinking ‘how am I gonna do this?’. It was a very deliberate pun on him.”īut then the 2015 leadership spill happened, and the book had to change. The ending was a little bit different too, because this certain someone was always ‘late to the party’. “The text originally read ‘a certain someone’, and it was much clearer that that ‘certain someone’ was Tony Abbott. “We had to change that in production,” Hopkins laughs.
The story follows Phoebe’s attempt to organise a surprise wedding for her mothers, inviting their friends and family, while retaining a hope that “you-know-who” shows up. Spread from Mummy and Mumma Get Married, by Roz Hopkins and Natalie Winter, with illustrations by Cara King.
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