The Yield, by Tara June Winch
The Indigenous Literature Reading Group met on 28th May 2021 to discuss Tara June Winch’s The Yield (Penguin, 2019). University of Kent MA student Elizabeth Fraser reviews the novel’s themes and potency.
In her stage performance WHERE WE BELONG, Madeline Sayet, Mohegan theatre-maker and keynote speaker of last week’s Indigenous Mobilities conference, recalls a time when “we still had all our words”. Comparing the admiration awarded to plays by William Shakespeare with the lack of respect or attention paid to Mohegan language, Sayet states:
Every single one of his [words], even the ones he made up… you gave value, you saved, you treasured, you cared for. And ours – you tore them from our throats and you threw them away because you did not understand them.
This passage chimes powerfully with the Indigenous Literature Reading Group’s selected text for May 2021. The Yield by Tara June Winch (2019) revolves around Wiradjuri Elder Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi’s effort to assemble the once-prohibited Wiradjuri language into a dictionary before his death from pancreatic cancer. Whereas Sayet’s show focuses on the settler colonial landscape of the United States, Winch’s novel unfolds in the region currently known as Australia. Nevertheless, given her claim that writing “with our worlds on our shoulders” is a burden shared by all First Nation authors, it seems likely that Winch herself would recognise an affinity between these two compositions on undermined vocabularies. Both works poignantly capture what it is like to spend a lifetime searching “for something complete to rest at [your] tongue” (Winch 29).
The Yield was released to critical acclaim and has since been optioned for the screen by Typecast Entertainment. As well as linguistic repression, the book touches on environmental exploitation, child sexual abuse and Aboriginal incarceration rates. Yet, it remains hopeful, despite its heavy subject matter. There is a strong theme of recovery, both cultural and personal, woven through the narrative. When Albert Gondiwindi’s granddaughter August returns to the fictional hamlet of Massacre Plains for his funeral, she unexpectedly feels kindness and connection from peers she had previously written off. The reading group found it refreshing to encounter a text that so masterfully demonstrates humour and affection opening up glimmers of light in a dark or dreaded space. Unlike some texts we have previously reviewed, Winch avoids implying that where tragedy has befallen before, it is destined to do so again. A particularly memorable moment in the novel is when a classmate she once felt judged by, Alena Dimitri, sneaks useful documents about tin mining to August by tucking them into a tray of home-baked lamingtons and delivering them with a kiss on the cheek (Winch 234). As readers, we witness August realise that there is a place for her after all in the homeland she fled after the disappearance of her sister Jedda. She no longer needs to hide in solitary exile at her bleak, dead-end dishwashing job in England.
This notion of complexity – of simultaneous “good” and “bad”; of second chances and preconceptions being overcome – is carried through in Winch’s portrayal of historical relations between Wiradjuri people and settlers. With a third of the novel consisting of fictionalised letters written in 1915 by a German missionary named Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf (the other two thirds being Albert’s first-person dictionary entries and August’s third-person return to Country in the present day), this is no simplistic rendering. Certainly, The Yield reveals the harm done by European colonisation of the land now called New South Wales. As a cultural outsider, Greenleaf butts into the narrative at will, often interrupting at critical points and leaving August’s story hanging. His unwanted intrusions and the physical space he occupies in the text speak volumes of the relative power his race affords him compared to the Aboriginal people he gathers in Prosperous Mission (the house where the Gondiwindis now live).
However, through his correspondence with the British Society for Ethnography, it is evident that Greenleaf is not a clear-cut coloniser. We learn that he increasingly protested against government assimilation policies and deeply regretted his own part in the so-called “civilising” project. We also learn that his advocacy for Wiradjuri people earned him especially harsh treatment in the internment camp he was eventually imprisoned in alongside other German-Australians during World War One. Through his characterisation, the trope of the wholly evil European falls through; there is no straightforward assignment of blame or black-and-white side to pick over the other. Around him, there additionally hovers the absent presence of another Lutheran German, Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), who famously cautioned after the Holocaust: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist…Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.” By evoking Niemöller through Greenleaf, Winch draws a parallel between initial Indigenous erasure and other subsequent types of social exclusion in hierarchical societies where there must always be scapegoats to populate the bottom rungs of the ladder. Rather than looking at what the Wiradjuri have endured in isolation, she links them into a wider context of attempted cultural genocide. Importantly, this lets her assert the severity of settler state actions against Aboriginal communities. At the same time, it allows her to advance a nuanced understanding of colonial violence as volatile and capable of rebounding on its original practitioners when political conditions change. The novel expertly shows that imperialism harms all involved; it is not only, and should not only be treated as, an “Indigenous issue”.
Thus, The Yield, though intensely and exquisitely local, resonates far beyond Massacre Plains. It leans into difficulty, demanding that the full picture of Australia be perceived while refusing to let Wiradjuri lives and words be flattened out. The core message of reclamation stays with the reader after the last page. Alongside Winch’s innovative use of form, which permits Albert’s and Greenleaf’s archived voices to join August’s from the past, it cements The Yield as a must-read.
Elizabeth Fraser is completing an MA in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kent. She is currently interning for the CISCS’s AHRC-funded project “Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presence in Britain”. She has previously researched heritage politics and settler colonialism in northwest Montana, U.S.A.