The Yield by Tara June Winch
“I was born on Ngurambang — can you hear it? — Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language — because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.”
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2020, Book of the Year, People's Choice, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at NSW Premier's Literary Award, and shortlisted for the VPLA and the Stella Prize, The Yield (2019) is the third book from Wiradjuri author, Tara June Winch, and one well worth spending some time with.
I’ve previously found myself with unmet expectations when picking books similarly heaped with praise and awards, but that was not the case with The Yield. Told through three different narrators, written in three different styles, Winch wields together a story that spreads its wings across decades and cultures.
Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi is dying. Knowing this, he begins to write a dictionary of sorts, the words of his people and ancestors, and in doing so, he tells us his own story.
August Gondiwini, Abert’s granddaughter, has been living in London for a decade. Running from her past and ancestors, she is called back to her home in Massacre Plains when she learns of her grandfather’s death.
The third narrator in the book is Reverand Ferdinand Greenleaf, whose experiences we learn about through a series of letters back to England. He details his early settlement in Australia and the challenges of setting up a Mission in 1880. Winch introduces us to the past, present and future of Massacre Plains and the Gondiwindi mob with each narrator.
On returning home, August is confronted by the past she has desperately been trying to escape: her lost sister, her ruptured family, and her fractured identity.
“Since she was a girl, the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she'd existed in a foreign land of herself.”
Most of the novel centres around August and the impact of intergenerational trauma. Repeatedly we are made aware of how thin August is, her lack of appetite and her reluctance to acknowledge what she is doing to herself. On first returning home, August’s sense of displacement is keenly felt, but as the novel progresses, she begins to find her feet as she is taken under the wings of her aunties and relatives. Her belonging, though, is woven with pain:
“She closed her eyes, a dam had broken, broken their little hearts, hearts born as fragile as clay. With her hands flat on the dry dirt and her eyes blinded by tears, she felt as if she were back home, back on the land she belonged to. At the same time, she thought that this was the saddest place on earth.”
August learns that the land her grandparent’s home resides on has been claimed under a 99-year land lease (something Winch doesn’t explain but is worth researching) and is to be demolished for a tin mine to be developed. As her grandmother prepares to pack and leave, August also learns Albert was writing a book, a dictionary of their language, and she sets out to find out what has happened to it. In the process, she begins to uncover more about the land, the past and her mob, feeling the threads of connection joining her back to her homeland.
As the mining contractors move closer, August is in a race against time to find Albert’s words and prove the Gondiwindi’s claim to the land as a place of cultural significance and Native Title rights.
Albert’s part of the story is told through his dictionary, sharing the language of the Wiradjuri people, their meanings both in terms of translation, cultural and personal. Using language in this way is a unique lens: it shows the power of words and how a shared dialect unites communities (something Winch also touches on in her 2006 debut novel Swallow the Air). In her author’s note, Winch draws our attention to the poignancy of using language in her novel in this way:
“Cultural knowledge, community history, customs, modes of thinking and belonging to the land are carried through languages. In the last two hundred years, Australia has suffered the largest and most rapid loss of languages known to history. Today, despite efforts of revitalisation, Australia’s languages are some of the most endangered in the world.”
Albert’s voice is strong, and reading through his dictionary in this manner felt symbolic to me, an elder sharing lessons and the value of staying connected to the things that draw you back to family and place. It is also a reminder of how much has already been lost in Australia and the importance of seeking out an education for the lands we call home beyond media highlights.
Reverend Greenleaf’s letters, for those unfamiliar with Australia’s colonial history, provide a raw insight, but Winch also keeps this accessible. The use of a white man to tell this part of the story perhaps creates a layer of removal for the author while continuing to invite the newer reader into Australia’s terrible past. While it would be easy to adopt Greenleaf as a standout, that all white men were ‘not bad’, Winch also nods to the problems of white saviours. On finding his letters, August and her Aunt Missy discuss the early settlement of the mission with Reverand Greenleaf at its helm:
“‘He was kind, you think?’
‘No. He was bad in a long pattern of bad. I reckon he just thought he was doing right.’
‘He regretted it.’
‘Yeah, but only when it happened to him too, aye.’”
Winch attempts to achieve a lot with this book. It gears up rapidly in the final quarter, with many threads of the story tied up quickly and neatly, despite how much energy is given to them in the early part of the book. Albert’s voice is the strongest throughout, and perhaps that is how the story is supposed to be read; a voice of an elder, long denied his place and language, striking through the most.
The Yield powerfully shows us the effects of intergenerational trauma, dispossession, and abuse. It shows us the empowerment of language and leaves us with a strong idea of a future Australia, one imbued with hope and healing.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
