The Yield: A Novel

Written by Tara June Winch

Narrated by Tony Briggs

Winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award and 2021 Kate Challis RAKA Award! 

""A beautifully written novel that puts language at the heart of remembering the past and understanding the present.""—Kate Morton

“A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia.”—Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A young Australian woman searches for her grandfather's dictionary, the key to halting a mining company from destroying her family's home and ancestral land in this exquisitely written, heartbreaking, yet hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering, and empowerment in the tradition of Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Harmon. 

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors, and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind.

After his passing, Poppy’s granddaughter, August, returns home from Europe, where she has lived the past ten years, to attend his burial. Her overwhelming grief is compounded by the pain, anger, and sadness of memory—of growing up in poverty before her mother’s incarceration, of the racism she and her people endured, of the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were children; an event that has haunted her and changed her life. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends and honor Poppy and her family, she vows to save their land—a quest guided by the voice of her grandfather that leads into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.

Told in three masterfully woven narratives, The Yield is a celebration of language and an exploration of what makes a place ""home."" A story of a people and a culture dispossessed, it is also a joyful reminder of what once was and what endures—a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling, and identity, that offers hope for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780063003491

Tara June Winch

Tara June Winch is the Wiradjuri author of two novels and a short story collection. For her first novel, Swallow the Air, she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and received mentorship from Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her second novel, The Yield, won Australia's highest accolade, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She was born in Australia in 1983 and currently lives in France with her family.

Reviews for The Yield

[Firedrake · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The invasion and subsequent occupation of Australia by the British has all but destroyed the most successful civilisation on the planet. An excellent modern novel about the complexities of human relationships to land, language, lore and lucre.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[tandah_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[pamelad_570511 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

August, a Wiradjuri woman, has come back to Prosperous House for the burial of her grandfather Albert Gondiwindi . Prosperous was the mission run in the early 1900s by the Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, a well-meaning Lutheran who tried to replace the Wiranjuri religion with Christianity, its indigenous foods with European crops, and its traditional culture with that of Europe. The brave and misguided Greenleaf did his best to protect the aboriginal men from murderous attacks by the angry whites from the nearby town of Massacre Plains, and the women and girls from rape and abduction.When Albert, called Poppy by his family, realised he was ill with cancer, he started writing a dictionary to preserve the Wiradjuri language. In his dictionary entries are the histories of his people and his family. They make up one of three narrative threads. The other two are excerpts from Greenleaf's diary, and August's experiences in the present.August returns to find that a mining company has taken over Prosperous, and her grandmother Elsie is to be evicted. Prosperous was originally built on Wiradjuri lands, so this is a double eviction. August knows that to establish Native title over the Wiradjuri land, and prevent the tin mine, she needs to prove a continuous cultural connection to the land and Poppy's dictionary is the start, if she can find it.This is a confronting book. It deals with the aboriginal peoples' displacement from their lands, destruction of aboriginal culture and language, massacres by early settlers, the separation of aboriginal children from their parents, the incarceration of aboriginal people, drugs and alcohol. Even so, it ends on a note of hope.

[caanderson-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great story, great characters, great writing. I like how the book jumps from the past to the present in order meet the deadline. It tugs at your heart as you learn on the devastation brought on by colonization on native people.