The Yield

The Yield is a novel by the Aboriginal Australian author Tara June Winch, published in 2019. It follows a Wiradjuri woman who returns home to Australia from the United Kingdom to attend a funeral.

What she finds when she arrives is that her ancestral lands are threatened by mining. The book is built around a search for what can be kept when the country itself is being taken, and it treats language as the thing most at risk. The strands of the book meet where the land is being worked out from under the family.

The novel includes a Wiradjuri language dictionary within it, and the story is told alongside that dictionary rather than in front of it. Its concerns are colonialism, environmental damage and intergenerational trauma, and the return home is the event that forces all three into the open.

The author is a Wiradjuri woman and the book is dedicated to her family, and it is a novel about a funeral that turns into an argument about who the land belongs to.