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The Yield by Tara June Winch review – reclaiming Australia's Indigenous voices

Tara June Winch’s moving novel begins with an invitation to take her language into your mouth. Poppy Albert Gondiwindi, of the Wiradjuri people of what is now called New South Wales, begins the story in the present day. “I was born on Ngurambang – can you hear it? – Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words.” He is making a dictionary of Wiradjuri, a task which will have greater import than he will live to realise, for he is dying of pancreatic cancer. He knows his endeavour is urgent: “I’m taking pen to paper to pass on everything that was ever remembered. All the words I found on the wind.”

Related: ‘I had to be manic’: Tara June Winch on her unmissable new novel – and surviving Andrew Bolt

This is Winch’s second novel: she is herself of Wiradjuri heritage, and an afterword makes clear how significant it is for her to give that heritage a place in wider culture. It is an effort that is being recognised; when The Yield was published in Australia in 2019, it won the Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. Poppy’s dictionary runs through this novel, with English words given their Wiradjuri translations; after each translation comes a brief glimpse of how the word links to family, to land, to story. There is suicide – balubuningidyilinya; house or dwelling place – bimbal, ganya; eternity, things to come – girr.

Laced into this rich catalogue of words, each one offering a glimpse of a civilisation that the colonisers of the land worked so hard to eradicate, are two other narratives. August is Poppy’s granddaughter, “about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties” with “nothing to show”. She has left Australia for England but decides to return for his funeral; when she arrives, she finds that their community is under threat. There is a proposal to build a tin mine, two kilometres wide and 300 feet deep, another scar on a land already scarred for centuries: it’s enough to know that August and Poppy’s hometown is called Massacre Plains, named for reprisals against the Indigenous people who attempted to defend their land.

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One way to keep the mining company away would be to prove the current residents’ “cultural connection” to the local area or “country”, as Indigenous Australians say. Poppy’s dictionary may hold the key, and August is drawn into the local resistance, experiencing a growing sense of reconnection to the place in which she grew up.

The third narrative is provided through letters written by the Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf in 1915 to a Dr George Cross of the British Society of Ethnography. Greenleaf is a missionary working among the people of Massacre Plains who sees that his presence is not benign. Though for three decades he has laboured “to ameliorate the condition of the Native tribes”, he comes to perceive that government policy – to eradicate native languages, to separate children from parents and worse – visits evil on the people he came, as he believed, to serve. He determines, at the end of his life, “to tell how wrongs became accepted as rights”.

Taken together, these three narratives offer a layering of time. In Poppy’s dictionary the reader is allowed to glimpse the deep time which, for tens of thousands of years, fed and nourished the lives of the Wiradjuri. August has an older sister, Jedda, who is a ghostly presence in the novel: she disappeared while still a schoolgirl, when August was only nine. No trace of her has ever been found. It is a mystery unresolved, and purposefully so: Jedda’s vanishing is a symbol of the price the people of Massacre Plains still pay for the history inflicted upon them. Jedda’s disappearance brings another silencing, an echo of the way in which the Wiradjuri people’s language was taken from them: “All the religion and the festivity of a full house became mute rooms, faded to white noise.”

In Wiradjuri the word for “yield” is baayanha. But as the reader learns throughout this book, translation is far from simple. “Yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim,” Poppy Gondiwindi writes. In Wiradjuri, “it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things”. This is a novel full of the spaces in between. Much of the brutality is revealed glancingly: we learn, for instance, that Poppy and his sister were separated, taken to live in institutions designed to sever them from their cultures, but the reader must imagine the true cost of that for herself. Yet when August and her aunt Missy visit a museum exhibition of Aboriginal “artefacts”, Missy’s rage is blunt. “They should work out how many of us they murdered and have a museum of tanks of blood,” she says.

The line has all the more power to shock because Winch has built her novel with subtlety and strength. This is a complex, satisfying book, both story and testimony. The Yield works to reclaim a history that never should have been lost in the first place.

• The Yield is published by HarperVia (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.