She has left Australia for England but decides to return for his funeral when she arrives, she finds that their community is under threat. August is Poppy’s granddaughter, “about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties” with “nothing to show”. 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. There is suicide – balubuningidyilinya house or dwelling place – bimbal, ganya eternity, things to come – girr. 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. 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. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity.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. Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed.

Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land – a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. He finds the words on the wind.Īugust Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. In the language of the Wiradjuri yield is the things you give to, the movement, the space between things: baayanha. The yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land.

The yield by tara june winch