A review by definebookish
The Yield by Tara June Winch

hopeful reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Twentysomething August Gondiwindi is living on the other side of the world when news of her grandfather’s death reaches her. ‘Poppy’ Albert helped to raise her back in Massacre Plains, on the banks of the now dried-up Murrumby River – a home she was ready enough to leave behind for England a decade ago. Returning for his funeral, she now finds the family land under threat from a mining company and her grandmother resigned to impending displacement.

I loved this story of family and legacy and language from Tara June Winch. In the present day we have August, grieving not only her grandfather but a lost sister, and parents lost in other ways entirely. Interwoven with her narrative are excerpts from the Wiradjuri dictionary that Albert was writing before his death – much more than context or seasoning, the definitions tell his own story of love and loss as one of the Stolen Generation. A third strand is a serialised letter penned over a century earlier by one Reverend Greenleaf, a European missionary whose supposed benevolence brings suffering upon the indigenous people he means to help.

While Greenleaf’s sections perhaps don’t sing in the way the other two do, together all three strands combine into a compelling feat of scale and perspective. This is both the story of the violent colonisation of an entire people, and an intimate story of personal pain and personal joy. 

The sense of place is beautifully vivid here, all the more so for the privilege of seeing the country rendered partly through indigenous words. The author’s note explains that pre-colonisation, there were over 250 distinct languages in Australia, and about 600 dialects – and having read this story of a man rediscovering his ancestral language after having it wrenched so brutally away, there’s a bittersweetness to the thirty-page Wiradjuri dictionary Winch includes at the end of the story. A moving, hopeful, triumphant book. 
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