Tara June Winch is the Wiradjuri author of Swallow the Air and After the Carnage, and her latest release The Yield is due to be released in the US on 2 June 2020 (following its 2019 release in Australia). It has achieved successes in prestigious literary prizes including being shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize, winning Book of the Year, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and People’s Choice Award at the 2020 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, and it is currently longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Our co-host Jaclyn loved this book and is overjoyed that many more international readers will now be able to read this one too. The novel is told in three voices and timelines—in a dictionary being compiled by Poppy Gondiwindi, in the letters of a German Lutheran missionary, and the protagonist, August Gondiwindi, in the contemporary timeline.
After ten years living in the United Kingdom running from her past, Poppy’s death calls August back home to Prosperous, the house she grew up in with her sister Jedda. Seeing her family again and walking the halls of Prosperous bring back every aching memory she tried so long to escape. Upon returning, August discovers that Prosperous is no longer her family’s—and in fact never was. The government sold has sold it to a tin mine, leaving her grandmother with no certain place to go.
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You mention in an interview with Melissa Lucashenko that you started this book with the title—can you tell our readers a little about what “The Yield” means in the context of the story, and your choice to unpack this across the three different narrative voices?
Yield, as we know in English has the dual meanings of taking up and giving in—because the title is in English I wanted to speak to the literal interpretations for English speakers. Within the text baayanha (Wiradjuri for yield) is introduced, to me it seems as the meaning is somewhere between the English definitions, it sits within that space between. I think in terms of the novel, both definitions apply—characters are giving into pressure, they are giving up their freedoms, others are taking, and have taken from the land, in respect to the anthropological items taken by pastoralists and land owners to be housed in museums, and the historical disregard to burial and ceremonial sites. The novel also works on another level as a handbook for claiming native title for the characters, and the ancestral agricultural techniques are laid out in the text, jutting against the modern day use for the sacred land where the novel is set—being a working wheat farm.
You mentioned in the same interview that August was the hardest character to write, and hers is the only perspective not written in first person. Can you tell us a little about what you wanted the reader to take from this choice in each perspective?
I find third person narrative a little difficult, knowing when it is the right moment in a story to show other characters feelings and motivations, that’s the writerly-type side to the difficulty. The other obstacle in writing this strand was because August’s pain felt too close to my own. I needed a sort of distance from August too, in order to get the action into the story, to move the novel along and allow the reader to anticipate getting back to her chapters to find out what happens to everyone: past, present and future.
Language plays such a central role in The Yield, with one of the threads based around a Wiradjuri language dictionary that Poppy is writing (a copy of which is extracted at the end of the novel). The themes of remembering and agency and discrimination all play a role in the way that language brings the three narratives together in the book—can you tell us a little about what inspired you to explore language the way you do?
Explaining ‘a little’ is problematic, as Poppy says, ‘this is a big, big story’—which is true to life. First Nation languages are central to our continual connection to land, culture and family, so that when our mother tongues were denied historically (and today) it not only removes deep links to our sense of selves, but it destroys the possibility to continuum. Language is important, and underestimated in how it has been used in the brutal spiritual subjugation of people. I tried to look at as many strands of language denial as were necessary to the story overall, and that ended up leaking from our voices, to the outsider voices, the migrant voices also. The crossover was needed to have the reader understand the severity of language discrimination. I also wanted our mob, for First-Nation readers to read the book too, I wanted the novel to pique interest in the beauty and deep-rootedness of our own words and our #ownstories.
What do you think international readers may take from reading The Yield, and does this differ from what you think Australian readers might take from it?
I’d hope they’d enjoy the novel as a story first and foremost, just like (some) Australians have. The morality, the application of meaning onto their own countries, that’s to be seen. I can only hope the book speaks.
What are some of your favorite aspects of works by contemporary Indigenous writers, and what are some directions you’d love to see taken in works by the next generation of Indigenous authors?
Our poets are insanely good, the poetry is succinct in the way of a song or dance, it gets to the heart and then rips it out. Poetry is also a perfect medium for bringing more bilingual texts to readers. I’m excited to read more veracity in young, up and coming voices.
Which women writers have been influential on your own writing, and do you have any recommendations of books by women writers that you’ve enjoyed recently? (We love your list of Australian women and non-binary writers that you shared in your recent Stella Prize interview!)
Oodgeroo Noonuccal is our poet laureate, our guiding light. I’m influenced by her, and Ali Cobby Eckermann. Kirli Saunders and Ellen van Neerven are next in line, perfect poets shattering the literary landscape of Australia. I’m influenced by international women writers too, we speak on the ground, in the mess of things, against each other’s skin. There are too many to name.
Can you tell us a little about your current work(s)-in-progress?
A little reprieve from Australia, a psychological thriller about maternal love, set in the Swiss Alps.
About
Tara June Winch is the Wiradjuri author of novel Swallow the Air and short story collection After the Carnage. For her first novel, 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. She was born in Australia in 1983 and currently lives in France with her family.
