The central motif that threads all through is the missing: missing people missing history missing documentation a missing dictionary, missing artefacts and other memorabilia and a missing language. Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land – a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company.

She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. He finds the words on the wind.Īugust Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. That collection had an international perspective (Winch now lives and works in France), but The Yield is unmistakeably Australian. The Yield is the long-awaited second novel of Wiradjuri woman Tara June Winch who transfixed the Australian literary scene with her first novel Swallow the Air in 2006 (see my review) and followed that up in 2016 with an impressive short story collection called After the Carnage ( see my review). There is so much to discover within its pages!

I liked this absorbing book so much, as soon as I’d finished it, I read it all over again.

Tara winch the yield