"Culture has no armies, does it?"

The Yield is superb. Three separate stories take place, connected in a thousand different ways. There's August, a young woman returning to Australia in the early 21st century after several years abroad, to a past she has consciously left behind. There's her dying grandfather, some time earlier, writing a dictionary of the forgotten words of his (Indigenous) people. And there's a 19th century missionary who finds himself the only defender of those same people against an unforgiving populace.

Winch's novel has much to recommend it. (My review is 4.5 stars, but in this case I'm bumping up rather than down due to the sheer force of the novel's compassion.) First, there is her writing style: clear, focused, intrigued by the most minute details, shifting the narrative voice in unison with its characters. The subtle intricacies of the novel deserve mention too, with the concepts from Poppy's dictionary resonating through both the past and present. August still holds out some tendrils of hope for a sister who went missing when they were children; Poppy, unbeknownst to her, seeks his own answers. Reverend Greenleaf attempts to be the saviour of a culture; to August and her family in the present day, he is equally villainous as those he fought against. The Reverend's awakening to the brutality against the Wiradjuri people in the 19th century reflects through Poppy's reminiscences of his awakening to his own culture in the 20th century, which is then reflected in August's attempts to salvage a little of that in the 21st. Winch's plurality of voices also leaves open the possibility of re-interpretation. For example, I don't think Greenleaf is as bad as August does, but then I bring my own biases to the text too.

At the heart of the book, Winch seems to be asking not how do we protect the artifacts of culture (words, letters, tools, much loved homes with chintzy decor) but how we protect the culture underneath? What obligations do each of us have as individuals to our broader clan? And how do we regain what has already been lost? A novel in which one-third of the book is an old man compiling a dictionary sounds inherently dull, but these sections radiate with warmth and heartbreak. I grew up in Wiradjuri country and my eyes lit up when I saw the map on the first page, excited to return to the dusty world of my youth. Winch captures it well, true, but she is also laying bare an entire culture that had existed alongside mine, in my culture's shadow, as it were, and this poignancy imbues every page.

(On a lighter note, the fact that the Australian Winch has lived in Europe for many years, and has an international writing presence, adds a humorous tone for me in her portrayal of some of the details. While the modern-day chapters of the novel are written with descriptive verisimilitude, Winch has to think of her international audience, and thus chooses to over-define such concepts as Aussie Rules, Vegemite, and Lip Smackers. It's a smart choice, and I think it will help protect The Yield against becoming dated. But as someone who grew up in the same time and place as August, I couldn't help but chortle at the narrator in these moments!)

Well worth it. ( )

Albert Gondiwindi has died, and his grand-daughter August returns from England to country, to attend his funeral. When she arrives she finds the family getting ready to clear out, having lost a battle to prevent a mining company from forcibly acquiring the land that their people have lived on for generations. As she reconnects with her past, August gets caught up in the fight to stop the miners.

As the story unfolds, we also see instalments of an account by Rev Greenleaf, a Federation-era Lutheran missionary, of the treatment he and the local indigenous people received when he tried to establish the settlement that August's people live on. We also see instalments from a dictionary that Albert tried to compile to preserve the language of his people.

These devices are a very clever means of advancing Winch's plot, especially the dictionary. The examples Albert uses to explain words are selected from his own experience, and they fill in the story of his life and the indigenous history of the country. Greenleaf's letter provides the backstory of white settlement in the area and the impact it had on the local indigenous people.

There have been a lot of very impressive novels from Australian authors recently, and this is another excellent one. Winch's story of heart-breaking dispossession and a modern-day fight to reclaim what was lost is both powerful and uplifting. ( )

I've had this book out from the library for quite a while. Nobody else seemed to want to read it so I just kept renewing the book every 3 weeks. It's a shame that more people haven't heard of this because the parallels between the aborigines in Australia and the indigenous peoples of Canada are extensive. We could learn so much from the other countries around the world that were subject to the disruptive settler system.

When August Gondiwondi learns that her grandfather has died she drops everything in England and returns home to the interior of New South Wales in Australia. She left Australia ten years previously and roamed around Europe. Her grandparents had raised her and her sister, Jedda, after their parents were imprisoned. The Gondiwondi clan had lived in the same area near Massacre Plains for many generations. When August returned home she learns that their house and the surrounding countryside is about to be destroyed to dig an open-face tin mine. The Gondiwondis had never had formal title to the land and it looks like their long-standing ties don't mean anything. August had been planning to return to her life in England after her grandfather was suitably sent off but she finds that she just can't leave and let this happen without a fight. Her grandfather had been compiling a dictionary of the ancestral language which showed how tied to the land the people were. There is also the matter of Jedda's disappearance which has never been solved. After more than 10 years she is undoubtedly dead but what if she's not and she returns home to find it has been obliteratred. As August has relearned, family means everything. Even though the white settlers tried to disrupt family relationships and their ties to the land and their culture they didn't succeed. There are still vestiges that could be grown over time.

I was quite taken with the book's cover. Everytime I picked it up I would gaze at it briefly and I thought it was probably meant to evoke the ground with the grain plants sprouting from it. When I was about halfway through it I discovered that the cover designer, Jon Gray, had written a note about how he came up with the design. I was somewhat correct as he says: "These marks seemed to represent that: the ploughed mud, the shape of wheat as it rises to the sun." Of course, there is more to it than that as the meaning of the title of the book is also worked into it. In the Wiradjuri language baayanha means yield but not the conventional English meaning of that word. "In my language it's the things you give to, the movement, the space between things." And so Jon Gray designed his cover with small amounts of space between the marks. Cover design at its best adds another dimension to a book and that is what you see here. ( )

Jumps around but it comes together in the end. OK. A bit of a background on 1st nations thinking of land and culture. ( )

Slow start however it turned into a wonderful deep read as three stories wove together to tell the story of a family and its community at Massacre Fields and its mysteries and discovery. It's about language, family, loss and belonging. Like most recent Australian First Nations history, it's also tragic, but the writing is elevated and beautiful. ( )