Winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin Award
July 6, 2020
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. Albert Gondiwindi, facing a terminal illness, begins writing the story of his Wiradjuri family in the town of Massacre Plains. Upon his death, his granddaughter August, who had moved to England to get away from the town, returns for the funeral. 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. 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. 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. The strongest chapters are from Albert, in narratives framed as dictionary entries of his ancestors and their disappearing culture. While the shifts in narrator interrupt the flow, Winch succeeds at contextualizing August’s story with cultural history. The result is often quite moving. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.
May 30, 2019
The Yield unpicks intergenerational trauma and redacted histories in prose that glimmers. The word ‘yield’ has a dual meaning: in English it refers to the harvest reaped from the land and in the language of the Wiradjuri people, its equivalent baayanha means the circumstances we individually bend to. Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi gathers the scattered papers of his Wiradjuri-English dictionary knowing his final days draw close. When his granddaughter August hears of his death, she comes home to Massacre Plains—at first unwillingly—and finds the place and her family need her help. The Yield is cleverly constructed, alternating between August’s third-person, contemporary narrative, Poppy’s testimony, and the archival letters of the benighted Reverend Ferdinand B Greenleaf, the narrative weaving back and forward in time, gathering its strands into a deep and powerful conclusion. Encompassing the consequences of colonisation and how acknowledging white complicity leads to healing, the vivid voices of the characters, as well as the book’s troubled young hero, reminded me of Kim Scott’s Taboo. The Yield is a bleak and beautiful book that eloquently phrases the weight of history, with an ultimately uplifting sensibility at its heart: that of the power of storytelling across thousands of years.
Anne Barnetson is a bookseller and illustrator based in Perth