The Rainbow Cubby House

Overview

The Rainbow Cubby House is part of the Australian Learn to Include early-reader series by Brenna Harding and Vicki Harding, illustrated by Chris Bray-Cotton. The series is strongest as a cluster: My House, Going to Fair Day, The Rainbow Cubby House, and Koalas on Parade share creators, publisher, child characters, family-diversity aims, and sparse but useful public records. This member centers backyard building work with two mothers, Jed, and Jed's two fathers. Its importance lies in ordinary activity rather than argument: home, pets, fair, backyard building, school performance, food, sunscreen, costumes, and friendship become the settings where two-mother and two-father families are made visible. Scholarship and Australian media context connect the series to school inclusion and debates around children's media, while local copy inspection remains important for dates, logos, and exact wording.^[4][7][8][1]

One Four-Book Series

The four Learn to Include titles are best read together. Their individual public trails are thin, but the shared source base is substantial enough to support a clear cluster: same creators, same illustrator, same publisher, same child-centered early-reader format, and recurring family-diversity scenes. Treating each title as an isolated flagship would make the evidence look weaker than it is. Treating them as a series shows the real pattern: repeated ordinary situations where same-sex-parent families appear in early reading materials.^{[2][3][4][5][7]}

Ordinary Activity As Inclusion

This member's plot is deliberately everyday: backyard building work with two mothers, Jed, and Jed's two fathers. That ordinariness is the series' main representational strategy. The books do not begin with a debate over whether two mothers or two fathers count as family. They place those families inside home description, school friends, pets, fair food, a cubby house, or a costume parade. For young readers, these activities make family structure part of a social world rather than a separate lesson. That is why the series is useful beside broader family-diversity books.^[1][4][7]

Australian Education And Media Context

The Australian context gives the series a sharper setting. Star Observer coverage describes Learn to Include as part of a project to raise awareness of same-sex parenting, and later Guardian and SBS reporting on Play School shows that children's media and same-sex-parent family visibility remained publicly discussed in Australia. These sources should not be collapsed into a single causal story. They do, however, show a cultural field in which early-reader books, school resources, and children's television all became places where families with two mothers or two fathers could be recognized.^{[8][9][10][11]}

Scholarly Reading Of Difference

Riggs and Augoustinos give the series an interpretive frame beyond simple celebration. Their analysis treats the Learn to Include books as resources that promote inclusion while also marking some families as the families that must be explained. That tension is useful for a museum-style record. It lets the collection show both the practical value of the books and the limits of diversity pedagogy. The series can normalize same-sex-parent families, but it also reveals how educational materials categorize difference for children.^[7][12][13]

Timeline

1. 2002Learn to Include establishedPublic reporting places Learn to Include in the early-2000s Australian same-sex-parent awareness context.^[8][9]
2. 2002Going to Fair Day recordGoogle Books records Going to Fair Day as an early Learn to Include title.^[3]
3. 2004My House recordNational Library of Australia and Google Books preserve the My House record trail.^[6][2]
4. 2005Rainbow and Koalas recordsGoogle Books records The Rainbow Cubby House and Koalas on Parade in the series trail.^[4][5]
5. 2008Australian press contextStar Observer reported on children, gay families, and Learn to Include-related resources.^[8][9]
6. 2014Professional bibliographyNaidoo's handout preserves rainbow-family children's-book bibliography context.^[13]
7. 2016Play School context revisitedGuardian and SBS reporting revisited Australian children's media and same-sex-parent family visibility.^[10][11]
8. 2019Education report contextAll Together Now later cited comparable primary-school inclusion resources.^[12]

Learn to Include Series

A four-title Australian early-reader series presenting two-mother and two-father families through ordinary activities.

Citation

The Rainbow Cubby House. Brenna Harding and Vicki Harding; illustrated by Chris Bray-Cotton. Learn to Include, 2005. Tarpey-Schwed LGBT Families Children's Book Special Collection, Mechanics' Institute. Collection ID: KB-025.

Sources

1. Local collection catalog record for The Rainbow Cubby House · catalog
2. Google Books record for My House · library
3. Google Books record for Going to Fair Day · library
4. Google Books record for The Rainbow Cubby House · library
5. Google Books record for Koalas on Parade · library
6. National Library of Australia record for My House · library
7. Riggs and Augoustinos article on learning difference · scholarship
8. Star Observer report on kids and gay families · news
9. Star Observer report on gay books and children · news
10. Guardian report on Play School and diverse families · news
11. SBS report on Play School profiling a child with two dads · news
12. All Together Now pilot report · education
13. Naidoo handout on rainbow family books · bibliography
14. Out for Our Children book list · bibliography
15. Australian Queer Archives book catalog · archive
16. Archived Learn to Include page for Where Did I Really Come From? · publisher