When we meet August she is returning to Country for her grandfather’s funeral, and caught in a jag of compulsive recall. In The Yield, Tara June Winch uses three different voices to describe the Wiradjuri people’s journey through ‘executed forests/and hanged bridges’: Elder and compiler of a Wiradjuri language dictionary, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August (‘about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties nothing to show’), and the nineteenth-century missionary Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf. The narrator (‘obviously a survivor with obsessive memories’, Czesław Miłosz wrote) registers the meeting as a kind of insult the experience of oblivion, of visceral trauma and fear, make meeting the Mona Lisa, inert, endlessly waiting, feel like a cruel joke:
A survivor of the torrential wars and everyday business of annihilation being carried on behind the Iron Curtain comes face to face with Leonardo’s most famous painting, the pièce de résistance of the Louvre and representative of European cultural achievement. One of his most haunting poems, ‘Mona Lisa’, imagines a visit to Paris. In the poem ‘Mona Lisa’, published in Study of the Object (1961), the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wrote: Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.Some days it’s not so easy -WAAX, ‘ Big Grief’ 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.
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