The Yield

April 15, 2020
An Aboriginal woman uncovers her heritage, and her painful past, to save her family's home. August Gondiwindi, a dishwasher in London, receives word that her grandfather Poppy Albert has died and knows she must return to Massacre Plains, the small Australian town her family has lived in for generations--a place she hasn't visited in years: "Go back full with shame for having left, catch the disappointment in their turned mouths, go back and try to find all the things that she couldn't find so many thousands of kilometres away." She arrives at the family farm, Prosperous House, and as she helps her grandmother Elsie prepare food and clean for the large collection of aunts and uncles gathering for the funeral, she runs into former classmates and old flames and wrestles with her long-dormant grief at the disappearance of her sister, Jedda, who vanished when August was 9 and Jedda, 10. She also discovers that this may be the last time she sees her childhood home--her grandmother will soon be forced out of Prosperous House because a company plans to open a large tin mine on the land. Interwoven with August's story are two other narrative strands: a lengthy letter from the Rev. Ferdinand Greenleaf, who founded the mission that eventually became Prosperous House to "build a home of safety for the poor waifs and strays," and sections from a dictionary Poppy Albert was compiling of their family's native language before his death, which includes words from the author's ancestral Wiradjuri language. Albert's entries are easily the most charming parts of the book. "The dictionary is not just words--there are little stories in those pages too," he writes, and the same is true for his own effort, which weaves in reminiscences of meeting Elsie, fond memories of raising Jedda and August, and stories from his ancestors. But August's chapters suffer from a lack of clarity; it's often difficult to understand why events are significant, especially in the novel's more dramatic latter half. Too often, it's simply that the sentences are bewildering: "When the previous evening, like a virus, the true rumour that Rinepalm Mining had set an open day at the town hall filtered into the Valley, and back streets, the men and women, though on the edge of heatstroke, leapt from their houses and headed into town." A story woven from profound, overlooked historical material that's sadly marred by sloppy execution.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2020
August Gondiwindi returns to her Australian hometown for her grandfather Albert's funeral. She had left Prosperous, a former missionary town, years before, following her older sister's disappearance. She finds her grandmother prepared to leave their house to make way for a tin-mining company that has taken over the land; the family can't claim ownership of the land despite having lived there for centuries. August grapples with her connections to Australia as an Indigenous woman, and with her own history of loss and trauma. Winch unravels the Gondiwindi family history through August's narrative, August's grandfather's native-language dictionary entries, and the letters of 1915 missionary Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf. Through their perspectives, Winch illustrates the long history of colonization and erasure of Indigenous culture in Australia. The unique structure draws readers close while grounding the novel in history. Already a best-seller in Australia, Winch's second novel is a clear-eyed look at the experiences of native people and the ways in which history is inherited through generations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 12, 2020

DEBUT Three distinct narratives bind together Winch's riveting story of Australia's Indigenous people. From the proud patriarch Albert "Poppy" Gondiwindi and his peculiar bilingual dictionary, a haunting history of his ancestors the Wiradjuri comes alive, depicting their lore, their love of the land, their cruel defeat by white settlers, and his punishing days in the Boys' Home after his parents were run off their land. In 1915, the Rev. Ferdinand Greenleaf writes letters to His Excellency the Governor describing white acts of horror he has witnessed but gets not replies. Instead, with Britain at war, Greenleaf is taken to an internment camp for German settlers, where his fierce commitment to the Aborigines earns him extra punishment. Gondiwindi's granddaughter August returns for Poppy's funeral after 10 years in England. Although her arrival brings back painful memories, it also coincides with a mining company takeover of the land. She quickly grasps the importance of her heritage and uses her grandfather's dictionary, Greenleaf's letters, museum records of stolen Aboriginal artifacts, and buried native bones to challenge the company. VERDICT The Aborigines' story is one of yielding, of not taking from the land but of bending to the will of others, a tragic picture of the Australian colonial period. Winch makes a strong statement, beautifully rendered. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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