It began with a blog about school lunches. In late 2013, Kate Berry — a Melbourne-based freelance photographer and former café owner — started the Lunch Lady blog after her nine-year-old daughter was bullied at school for eating homemade food. The blog paired beautiful food photography with relatable parenting stories, and it was meant to do one thing: help her daughter get her spark back. It did that, and then it did something else entirely.
Louise Bannister and Lara Burke stumbled across the blog while working on a client project. The two were magazine makers by trade — and not just any trade. Together, they had co-founded frankie magazine in 2004, one of Australia's most beloved independent publications, and produced it for a decade before leaving to start other titles: Smith Journal, SPACES. In 2014, they formed their own publishing company, We Print Nice Things, and approached Berry about turning Lunch Lady into a quarterly print publication. The trio teamed up, and the first issue appeared shortly after.
The magazine was everything its founders intended: colourful, warm, funny, down-to-earth, and completely uninterested in the aspirational anxiety that defines most parenting media. Each issue was a kitchen keepsake — recipes, kids' cooking ideas, craft activities, photography features, real-life family stories, and humorous opinion pieces about the chaos of raising children. The design, led by Burke, was illustration-forward and retro-inflected, with the kind of matte paper stock that made readers want to keep it on the shelf rather than throw it in the recycling.
In 2017, Berry departed and Bannister and Burke became the magazine's full-time editors, running the operation from Byron Bay in the hinterland of New South Wales, where Bannister lives with her husband Rick and their three children, Harriet, Pearl, and Bon. The publication has since transitioned to a digital platform, but its editorial DNA remains unchanged: parenting should be fun, food should bring people together, and a magazine about family life should make its readers feel better, not worse, about the glorious mess of it all. From a bullied child's lunchbox to an internationally distributed magazine — it is the kind of origin story that only independent publishing can produce.
Explore Lunch Lady at <a href="https://hellolunchlady.com.au/" target="\_blank">hellolunchlady.com.au