Capturing the recent past with a whole lot of heart: Danielle Binks's middle-grade debut, The Year the Maps Changed

1999 feels at once like just last year and a whole world away. I was in my late teens, working in my family’s country style café and quilt store on the fringes of the small Hunter Valley town where I’d grown up. On evenings, I’d reluctantly go with my mother a couple of minutes south and turn down the road that led to the army base. It was a quiet patch of road, good for driving lessons and punctuated mainly by kangaroos and the occasional busload of cadets who’d wave wildly and jeer at my panicked attempts to change gears without stalling the car.

Soldiers were a fixture around town, and it was always good to see them looking clean-cut and pristine in their army-green uniforms. When we received word that refugees from the Kosovo War would be arriving at the army base and offered asylum, the whole town leaned forward as this international crisis became local. Soon, it wasn’t just buses of soldiers we saw around town; it was Kosovar-Albanian families – mothers, husbands, children, grandparents – often identifiable by their clothing that looked different to ours, and the fact that they were always together, often with soldiers for company. Our hearts went out to them; we wondered at their stories.

One slow Saturday in the café – there were were a lot of slow Saturdays – a man came walking in with an air of quiet authority. I recognised his face from tv, just as I heard his familiar voice. He gestured to the Kosovar family behind him and said he was a reporter with Sixty Minutes; would it be okay if they sat at our tables and talked?

For the next few hours, they gathered around one of our little wooden tables and passed questions and answers between them. The mother of the family spoke in Albanian, and her teenage daughter interpreted for the English-speaking journalist. She broke down several times as she told of the brother and son they had lost. A smaller sister clung to her, her dark eyes wide. I hovered uncertainly behind the counter, wishing there was something more I could do than offer cups of tea.

This moment when, for a tiny space in time, Australia’s history crossed paths with the much bigger story happening in south-eastern Europe has been little explored in fiction, but Danielle Binks’s warm and brilliant middle grade debut, The Year the Maps Changed, captures it all through the eyes of the fierce and immediately endearing Winifred – or Fred, to her dad.

Fred’s life in her hometown on the Mornington Peninsula is complex. Since her mother passed away when she was six, Fred has been raised by her grandfather and her adoptive dad, Luca. But it’s looking more and more like her Pop won’t be returning home to his flat out the back of Fred’s house, and Luca is growing closer to his girlfriend Anika and her son Sam. Before she’s ready, Fred finds herself with a family she hasn’t chosen and a home life quite different from the one she’s always known.

At the same time, the bigger broader world outside suddenly comes to Fred’s doorstep with the arrival of a group of Kosovar-Albanian refugees who will be accommodated locally as part of the Australian government’s Operation Safe Haven. For Fred, it’s the first time that politics have had a face, a face that belongs to real people she encounters in her hometown, and Fred discovers that she cares deeply about these people who just need somewhere safe to stay.

Fred is a character with a huge heart, at once deeply true and beautifully natural. Her voice is flawless, and delights the reader at every turn. But Fred herself is not perfect; she is real and flawed, discovering who she is as she stands at the edge of young adulthood. Her tiny, soul-filled observations, the memories she surrounds herself with, fill her story with warmth and offer a rich insight into the complexities of grief and the changes that seem to be happening all too quickly. But Winifred’s supporting cast of characters is brilliant, too, and the men in her life – Luca, her Pop, and her schoolteacher Mr Khouri – are particularly worth noting. In a time when culture cries out for positive examples of healthy masculinity, these characters shine as exemplars of imperfect but good men who are at once wise and tender.

If it’s not already clear, I love this story. It is beautifully literary, peopled with characters to cherish and cheer for. It grapples with old truths in new and fresh ways – it has a conscience and such heart. In reading The Year The Maps Changed, your world will be made at once bigger and cosier.

I got to chat with author Danielle Binks about the process of writing Maps, and its links to her own personal experiences. Check back in tomorrow for this interview and the delicious insights Danielle provides.

The Year the Maps Changed
by Danielle Binks
Published May 2020 by Hachette Australia
312 pages