Shakespeare in the Orchard
By Danielle Binks
Lothian Children’s Books, 2026
Reviewed by Zewlan Moor
Danielle Binks has returned to a winning formula with her latest novel, Shakespeare in the Orchard. Like in the award-winning The Year the Maps Changed, she has crafted a coming-of-age story about the complexities of Australian national identity when it comes face-to-face with people labelled “outsiders”.
The Year the Maps Changed follows Kosovar-Albanian refugees who fled the Yugoslavian civil war in 1999 to settle in the Mornington Peninsula. This is also the setting of Shakespeare in the Orchard, 85 years earlier, in 1914. Specifically, the setting is the small town of Lagwarrin, which is forever changed when its army base is transformed into an internment camp for “enemy aliens”. In practice, this means anyone living in Australia with a German or Austro-Hungarian surname.
Thirteen-year-old Jack is busy being the man of the house now that his older brother, Matt, has enlisted and been shipped out to Egypt. His time is divided between school, cadets and helping his mother at the farm. The war has left them short of seasonal workers for the apple harvest, so when the detainees arrive at the internment camp, Jack and his mother have little choice but to accept their offer of labour, or see the apples rot on the ground.
Of course, as Jack spends more time with the “enemy aliens”, he learns more about them. One is a father whose wife and daughter, Lotti, have followed him to Langwarrin, and who are befriended by Jack’s friend Walter. Neither having perfect English and living for generations in Australia nor being successful businessmen protects the men from being rounded up and locked up just for their ethnicity.
In an effort to maintain morale, the detainees decide to perform Hamlet at the internment camp. Jack is exposed to the play through listening to them rehearse as they pick apples. The themes of grief over a lost father, power and revenge resonate with him personally.
Interesting primary source texts are peppered throughout the novel, ranging from Department of Defence notices to the official news release of the landing of Australasian troops at Gallipoli in May, 1915. Some letters from Matt convey the everyday routines of the soldiers in Egypt, as well as his stoicism and compassion for his mother and brother.
This would be a wonderful classroom set text for Years 7-9, with many options to explore Hamlet, Macbeth, The Odyssey and other Greek myths. It could also be read in conjunction with Interned by Pamela Rushby, and The Art of Taxidermy by Sharon Kernot, both of which explore German internment camps in Australia. Bette Greene’s Summer of My German Soldier is a gripping comparison text from 1973. Similarly, picture books such as Tokuda-Hall and Imamura’s Love in the Library and Tonia, Gutiérrez and Sasaki’s Unbreakable: A Japanese-American Family in an American Incarceration Camp deal with internment camps during WW2 in the United States. Of course, detention centres persist in contemporary society (some argue that Australia holds the dubious honour of having exported them to the rest of the world), and the current manifestation is explored in Barbed Wire Between Us by Wenjen and Enccarnación.
Zewlan Moor
