Slowly, we become entangled in the characters’ lives. It is a novel that rewards readerly patience it takes a while to realise what’s at stake. 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 was an effective move on Winch’s part to resist writing August in the first person. The New Wiradjuri Dictionary by Dr Uncle Stan Grant Sr and Dr John Rudder informs the language in The Yield.

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. There is a hole left by a sister’s disappearance: a mystery decades-old. August’s family, on her return, is riven by an upcoming mining decision. In contemporary Aboriginal fiction, a common theme is ‘returning’ – returning to Country, family, language, and culture, all of them intertwined. 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’. August never had a childhood, never had a break. She comes back to Country for Pop Albert’s funeral after spending a decade abroad, running away from a past. Admirers of Kim Scott’s Taboo and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip will enjoy Winch’s Aboriginal realism.Īugust, the main character in the present-day narrative, is in her early twenties but world-weary. This contraction is pointed: Winch reminds us we are in a site of settler–invader violence, one without a treaty. Abbreviating, the Aboriginal characters call it ‘Massacre’. The different perspectives introduce us to life in the place where the Gondiwindi family live: Prosperous House, in the fictional town of Massacre Plains. It takes some time to get used to this structure, but ultimately it is rewarding. 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. Winch’s new novel, The Yield, is partly written in reclaimed Wiradjuri dictionary entries.

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

The yield by tara winch