Year of Publish: 2019

Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction

Setting: Australia, European colonisation and contemporary

Socio-cultural/Historical Background

1. Loss of Indigenous Language

Through Gondiwindi family and their experiences, Winch reflects the injustices faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through Australian colonial history – in particular, government and church-imposed language bans

• • With 90% of the approximately 250 languages spoken before invasion considered endangered, embodying a loss of culture, autonomy and heritage

1. Australian’s colonial history

Presenting a Lutheran missionary working in the fictional community of Massacre Plains, Reverend demonstrates a genuine concern for the welfare of the Aboriginal people despite being wrongly instructed in the initial undertaking of his role.

• Gondiwindi family’s claim of Prosperous as a site of cultural significance:
  • Sacred sites, sites of particular significance and places of cultural tradition are tangible aspects of the Region’s Indigenous heritage values. Knowledge of the locations of sacred sites is not widely shared outside of Traditional Owner groups to respect cultural traditions and protect the sites. Sacred sites can include story places where ancient spirits lived. Other culturally significant sites include burial sites, scar trees, midden sites, camp sites, shelter huts, stone artefacts, as well as places of significance during and post colonisation.
• Roles of Missionaries:
  • Each state and territory had independent policies and definitions introduced at different times and in different ways – Missions were broadly created by churches or religious individuals to house Aboriginal people, convert them to Christianity and prepare them for menial jobs. They were developed on land granted by the government for the purpose
  • Missionaries are designed to ‘protect’ First Australians, imposing a very patronising and paternalistic sense, as the Aboriginal people were thought to be a ‘dying race’ with inferior way of living
  • A strong implementation of control was enacted to erase people’s cultural identity: separation from their land and families, prohibition to speak their own language and passing on of cultural rituals and practices

Plot and Structure

• • • • Three layered Parallel Narratives

The Yield develops across three narratives: the story taking place in the present with August’s return to Prosperous; the story of colonial Australia as told by Reverend Greenleaf; and the stories shared by Albert in his dictionary.

What is the purpose of introducing multiple narrators?

Story of the Stolen Generation and the tragedy of the Aboriginal people through multiple narrators, not only the victims (August and Albert), but also Reverend Greenleaf as a Missionary – different genders, ethnicities and age group encompass a less biased, more comprehensive narrative because it is less influenced by a single social group.

For example, Reverend Greenleaf is more likely to be influenced by Western values. He interprets events differently. This provides different recounts of the same story to allow readers to piece together their own interpretation.

• • • • Characters

These interwoven stories reveal the pain of the losses suffered by Aboriginal peoples, and the quest for belonging and identity through reconnecting with language and land.

Character	Identity	Narrative Structure
August Gondiwindi	An Aboriginal woman returning to the land of Prosperous prompted by Albert’s funeral	August’s story follows a traditional narrative structure and forms the overarching action.
Reverend Greenleaf	A Lutheran missionary who serves the Massacre Plains who repents his sins after acknowledging his behaviours were not always in the best interests of the Aboriginal community	Reverend’s letter is broken up and inserted throughout August’s narrative, with nine parts and a final eulogy
Albert Gondiwindi	Elder of Massacre Plains’ Aboriginal community Writes a dictionary of the Wiradjuri language to reflect on stories from his past and family connections to place through special and formative memories	Albert’s dictionary is peppered throughout The Yield.
Jedda Gondiwindi	August’s sister who is missing and presumed decreased
Eddie Falstaff	August’s long-time friend, though friendship has been strained and damaged in the past; inherited an internalised racism and persistent colonial paternalism towards the Aboriginal community

Preview and Analyses

TARA JUNE WINCH The Yield. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks

https://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/tara-june-winch-the-yield-reviewed-by-suzanne-marks/#more-17174

Tara June Winch’s multi-award-winning novel is told in three voices, one of which takes the form of a dictionary.

Yield, bend the feet, tread, as in walking, also long, tall – baayanha. Yield itself is a funny word – yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things.

Winch explores just how much is caught up in the difference between those two definitions.

Albert ‘Poppy’ Goondiwindi is dying of pancreatic cancer and records his life by compiling a dictionary of the language of his people, which includes this definition of the book’s title. (The Complete Dictionary of Albert Goondiwindi: a work in progress is included as an appendix at the very end of the novel.)

These contrasting definitions of ‘yield‘ point the way in which the story will unfold and lie at the heart of Winch’s novel, which has won no less than four 2020 literary awards: the Miles Franklin Literary Award and three New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards – the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the People’s Choice Award and the Book of the Year Award. It more than lives up to these accolades.

There are a number of similarities between last year’s Miles Franklin winner, Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip, and The Yield. Both deal with intergenerational Aboriginal trauma, both feature a dying grandfather, a granddaughter returning home, and a struggle over land rights against a mining company. But their mode of storytelling differs. Lucashenko addresses the shameful history of white colonisation through the troubled, quirky Salter family. While Winch explores similar themes, her lens is broader.

Her story’s richness lies in how she weaves the perspectives of her three key protagonists. Following his parents’ deaths from an ‘Old World disease’, Albert ‘Poppy’ Goondiwindi was taken from his family and community and raised on a Lutheran Mission named Prosperous House situated on the banks of the Murrumby river on Massacre Plains (the name speaks for itself). There a sign instructs him to ‘Think White. Act White. Be White.’ When the novel opens, his granddaughter, August, has returned home after 10 years in England – ‘with nothing to show for it’ – to be with her dying Poppy, only to be confronted with everything she tried to leave behind.

The third voice is that of the Lutheran Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, who has come to Massacre Plains to establish an Aboriginal mission and is chronicling his experiences in letters to Dr George Cross of the British Society of Ethnography in 1915. Ferdinand is one of the white humanitarians historian Henry Reynolds writes of in The Whispering in our Hearts. From primary sources, Reynolds charts the despair and anger of those who stood up against the mistreatment of Aboriginal people and ‘the (so called) noble institutions of Great Britain’, and bore the guilt and despair of still operating within its toxic imperial system.

In The Yield, the Reverend Greenleaf writes:

That vile inhumanity practised by the white-skinned Christian on his dark-skinned brother in order to obtain land and residence, for ‘peaceful acquisition’ – that includes capture, chains, long marches, whipping, death on the roadside, or, if surviving all of these – the far more terrible fate – being sold like brutes of the field as unpaid labour to the highest bidder.

Contrasted with Ferdinand’s experience of British colonial desecration of people and country, we are taken into Poppy Albert’s reality – one born of the spirit of the land, of time remembered, embedded in nature before white settlement. It is through the trees, the animals, the waters of the Murrumby river, that the reality of language and culture lives on.

Water – galing, guugu, ngadyang The Reverend wrote it in his journal as culleen – he is listening that fella, listening as close as he could. All my life been near the water, and we come from the water too, us people. First we were born from quartz crystal – that’s hard water, we are kin of the platypus, that’s the animal of the water, and then, my wife Elsie and I made Missy and Jolene and Nicki, born on the banks of water, the Big Water – Murrumby.

Memory is a recurring theme in this novel. August’s return to her birth home, Massacre, is fraught with sorrow and pain. She is haunted by memories of the unsolved disappearance of her sister Jedda in childhood. As she drives towards her hometown she slows:

…momentarily at the only rest area… We had looked there for Jedda – a shoe, a scrap of dress, a scruff of hair. Nothing was found… then she wondered what difference it would make anyway, the discovery of Jedda, her in bones, bones no longer pecked by crows. There wouldn’t be any comfort for everything they’d lost.

I am moved by Winch’s literary skill in interweaving memory with her character’s present consciousness, drawing us into August’s inner dialogue as she slowly drives through the town. Familiar landmarks have disappeared or been transformed by the passage of time:

August passed Aunt Mary’s house, where she had brought up her son, and where her door remained open for the priest always. She drove at a crawl, looked into the open wounds of the cousins and second cousins and wayward schoolmates’ homes that she recognised. She saw no-one.

Through the beautifully drawn idiosyncrasies and circumstances of her characters, Winch provides important insights into the impact of the wider issues of dispossession, the fight for land rights, intergenerational trauma, imperial Christianity and discrimination born of racism and greed. But it is the love, compassion and intense understanding Winch demonstrates in her key characters that draws us to share their lived experience. Each in their own way strives to live out their highest ideals of justice and human decency, to celebrate their victories and endure the pain and disappointment when things of value are disrespected and lost, and that is what I take with me as I close this book.

The Yield by Tara June Winch review – reclaiming Australia’s Indigenous voices. Reviewed by Erica Wagner

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/23/the-yield-by-tara-june-winch-review-reclaiming-australias-indigenous-voices

Tara June Winch’s moving novel begins with an invitation to take her language into your mouth. Poppy Albert Gondiwindi, of the Wiradjuri people of what is now called New South Wales, begins the story in the present day. “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.” He is making a dictionary of Wiradjuri, a task which will have greater import than he will live to realise, for he is dying of pancreatic cancer. He knows his endeavour is urgent: “I’m taking pen to paper to pass on everything that was ever remembered. All the words I found on the wind.”

This is Winch’s second novel: she is herself of Wiradjuri heritage, and an afterword makes clear how significant it is for her to give that heritage a place in wider culture. It is an effort that is being recognised; when The Yield was published in Australia in 2019, it won the Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. Poppy’s dictionary runs through this novel, with English words given their Wiradjuri translations; after each translation comes a brief glimpse of how the word links to family, to land, to story. There is suicide – balubuningidyilinya; house or dwelling place – bimbal, ganya; eternity, things to come – girr.

Laced into this rich catalogue of words, each one offering a glimpse of a civilisation that the colonisers of the land worked so hard to eradicate, are two other narratives. August is Poppy’s granddaughter, “about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties” with “nothing to show”. She has left Australia for England but decides to return for his funeral; when she arrives, she finds that their community is under threat. There is a proposal to build a tin mine, two kilometres wide and 300 feet deep, another scar on a land already scarred for centuries: it’s enough to know that August and Poppy’s hometown is called Massacre Plains, named for reprisals against the Indigenous people who attempted to defend their land.

One way to keep the mining company away would be to prove the current residents’ “cultural connection” to the local area or “country”, as Indigenous Australians say. Poppy’s dictionary may hold the key, and August is drawn into the local resistance, experiencing a growing sense of reconnection to the place in which she grew up.

The third narrative is provided through letters written by the Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf in 1915 to a Dr George Cross of the British Society of Ethnography. Greenleaf is a missionary working among the people of Massacre Plains who sees that his presence is not benign. Though for three decades he has laboured “to ameliorate the condition of the Native tribes”, he comes to perceive that government policy – to eradicate native languages, to separate children from parents and worse – visits evil on the people he came, as he believed, to serve. He determines, at the end of his life, “to tell how wrongs became accepted as rights”.

Taken together, these three narratives offer a layering of time. In Poppy’s dictionary the reader is allowed to glimpse the deep time which, for tens of thousands of years, fed and nourished the lives of the Wiradjuri. August has an older sister, Jedda, who is a ghostly presence in the novel: she disappeared while still a schoolgirl, when August was only nine. No trace of her has ever been found. It is a mystery unresolved, and purposefully so: Jedda’s vanishing is a symbol of the price the people of Massacre Plains still pay for the history inflicted upon them. Jedda’s disappearance brings another silencing, an echo of the way in which the Wiradjuri people’s language was taken from them: “All the religion and the festivity of a full house became mute rooms, faded to white noise.”

In Wiradjuri the word for “yield” is baayanha. But as the reader learns throughout this book, translation is far from simple. “Yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim,” Poppy Gondiwindi writes. In Wiradjuri, “it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things”. This is a novel full of the spaces in between. Much of the brutality is revealed glancingly: we learn, for instance, that Poppy and his sister were separated, taken to live in institutions designed to sever them from their cultures, but the reader must imagine the true cost of that for herself. Yet when August and her aunt Missy visit a museum exhibition of Aboriginal “artefacts”, Missy’s rage is blunt. “They should work out how many of us they murdered and have a museum of tanks of blood,” she says.

The line has all the more power to shock because Winch has built her novel with subtlety and strength. This is a complex, satisfying book, both story and testimony. The Yield works to reclaim a history that never should have been lost in the first place.

The Yield by Tara June Winch. Reviewed by Ellen van Neerven

Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch is not afraid to play with the form and shape of fiction. Her dazzling début, Swallow the Air (2006), is a short novel in vignettes that moves quickly through striking images and poetic prose. Her second book, After the Carnage (2017), a wide-ranging short story collection, is set in multiple countries. Winch’s new novel, The Yield, is partly written in reclaimed Wiradjuri dictionary entries.

Three different voices narrate The Yield in bite-sized chapters: dictionary maker and elder Albert Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August, and nineteenth-century missionary Reverend Greenleaf. It takes some time to get used to this structure, but ultimately it is rewarding. The different perspectives introduce us to life in the place where the Gondiwindi family live: Prosperous House, in the fictional town of Massacre Plains. Abbreviating, the Aboriginal characters call it ‘Massacre’. This contraction is pointed: Winch reminds us we are in a site of settler–invader violence, one without a treaty. Admirers of Kim Scott’s Taboo and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip will enjoy Winch’s Aboriginal realism.

August, the main character in the present-day narrative, is in her early twenties but world-weary. She comes back to Country for Pop Albert’s funeral after spending a decade abroad, running away from a past. August never had a childhood, never had a break. Often said to be depressed, she sees her country in less than flattering terms: a ‘sparse, foreboding landscape’, dripping with ‘visual heat’, where everything is ‘browner, bone-drier’.

In contemporary Aboriginal fiction, a common theme is ‘returning’ – returning to Country, family, language, and culture, all of them intertwined. August’s family, on her return, is riven by an upcoming mining decision. There is a hole left by a sister’s disappearance: a mystery decades-old. August also comes back to an old love interest, Eddie; this ‘returning novel’ offers something new in its Wiradjuri framing, a language in a state of resurgence, with a growing number of speakers. The New Wiradjuri Dictionary by Dr Uncle Stan Grant Sr and Dr John Rudder informs the language in The Yield.

It was an effective move on Winch’s part to resist writing August in the first person. Through the third-person narration we are also able to get inside the heads of other characters, to see the place from multiple angles. It is a novel that rewards readerly patience; it takes a while to realise what’s at stake. Slowly, we become entangled in the characters’ lives. With August’s parents out of action – incarcerated on drug charges (‘never mean and bad parents, just distracted, too young and too silly’) – Winch deftly unpacks relationships between grandparents and grandchildren, aunties and nieces, and cousins.

As the tin-mining company claims a stake in Massacre Plains, as pipes and fences are secured, white environmental activists descend, calling into question black and green relations, the future of the environment and native title. August imagines herself free-falling to the bottom of a tin pit. The Yield is an anti-mining novel for the present day in the wake of the approval of the Adani coal mine in central Queensland.

Narrative Structure and Thematic Analysis on Discrimination

	Timeframe	Experience (Story)	Discrimination
August Gondiwindi An Aboriginal woman returning to the land of Prosperous prompted by Albert’s funeral	the Present	Left to England due to the traumas in Massacre Plains (the disappearance of Jedda) Returned to Prosperous to uncover that the mining company has purchased the land: protect the cultural significance of it by finding Poppy’s dictionary	Intergenerational trauma: – parents were suffering from addiction and depression (consequences of social discrimination and lack of social support) Feeling alienated: not accepted to the Western society while finding no sense of belonging to the Prosperous Sexual abuse by Jimmy (Mary’s cousin from school) Eddie inherited the social discrimination/paternalistic mindset Land dispossession: Mining companies trying to take over the land: imposing its will (interests) onto the Aboriginal people despite resistance Commodifying the land which land stewardship belongs to the Aboriginal people Disrespect towards the Aboriginal people
Reverend Greenleaf Lutheran missionary who serves the Massacre Plains	1915s	Writing about the Aboriginal people – primitive Australians: the Mission	Witnessed brutal, explicit violence: – Chain of Aboriginal people to a tree, exposed under the sun 🡪 Dehumanisation of Aboriginal people Systemic discrimination: > Killing of the slave (Aboriginal man): but penalised/fined minimally
Albert Gondiwindi Elder of Massacre Plains’ Aboriginal community	Transversing colonial era (1840s) to modern days	Scattered vignettes through the ancestors’ stories and personal lived experiences in form of a dictionary	Corrupted, dominating, paternalistic discrimination: > separated from his family to be put in a Boy’s Home, indoctrinated by the White Christian culture > The Stolen Generation: isolated from both groups – cultural erasure

Themes and Ideas