She presents the legacy of oppression and strife among local indigenous people and European settlers with great nuance.īut it’s when this initial thread intertwines with two other storylines that the novel fully realizes itself. Her portrayal of August’s rediscovery of herself and her ties to her home is moving. She soon discovers that her grandmother and family members are being evicted from their lands because an extraction company has acquired the mineral rights and plans to excavate a vast open-pit tin mine.Įven with a slightly pat ending, this thread of Winch’s narrative is irresistible, as she offers the reader both a tactile and spiritual feel for the forbidding landscape. She is returning after many years for the funeral of her grandfather, Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi, a revered Wiradjuri (indigenous Australian) elder. It’s a place “where the sun slap the earth with an open palm.” It’s the place she fled as a teenager after the traumatic disappearance of her older sister and protector. This is the small town where August grew up in the care of her grandparents. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.In Tara June Winch’s engaging third book, The Yield, a young woman named August Gondiwindi flies back to Australia, rents a car and drives seven hours inland to the aptly named town of Massacre Plains. While the shifts in narrator interrupt the flow, Winch succeeds at contextualizing August’s story with cultural history. The strongest chapters are from Albert, in narratives framed as dictionary entries of his ancestors and their disappearing culture. Albert, Greenleaf, and August narrate alternating sections: Greenleaf’s long letter describing mission history is heavily expository, while August’s section is where the plot lives, and it’s enlivened by dialogue with her family. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Wiradjuri artifacts have long since been excavated and removed, along with other brutal details chronicled in letters written by Reverend Greenleaf, the missionary who started the school in the late 19th century. After August learns the family’s home, an old mission station, will be destroyed to make way for a mine, she decides to stay, determined to save the home and land around it. Upon his death, his granddaughter August, who had moved to England to get away from the town, returns for the funeral. Albert Gondiwindi, facing a terminal illness, begins writing the story of his Wiradjuri family in the town of Massacre Plains.

This angry, elegiac tale of an aboriginal family from Indigenous Australian writer Winch ( After the Carnage) explores the charged meaning of the word Ngurambang, meaning country or home in the Wiradjuri language.

The yield by tara june winch