The Yield

4 ideas

1. Grandfather's dictionary against the tin mine

   August Gondiwindi returns from England to Massacre Plains in Wiradjuri country for the funeral of her grandfather Albert, and finds the family's land about to be taken for a tin mine. Albert's unfinished Wiradjuri dictionary and the 1915 letter of Reverend Greenleaf, a German missionary who ran the local mission, become the materials the family can use to show their continuing connection to the country. The novel is a case of a mining company's paper claim to land set against a people's memory, language and kinship.

2. Yield as giving back, not taking

   In settler and agricultural English, the yield is what you extract from land: the crop, the ore, the return on investment. Albert's dictionary turns the word around, so that the yield is what a people give back to country and what they keep hold of under pressure. Which meaning a society uses sets its relationship to land, as either a resource to be emptied or a relation to be kept up.

3. The dictionary entry as memoir

   Albert writes each Wiradjuri word with its meaning and then the memory, story or history it calls up, so the dictionary becomes his autobiography and his people's ethnography at the same time. This shows that a word in an endangered language carries law, place, kinship and history, not just a translation. Losing the word loses what it holds, and recording the word keeps the whole world around it.

4. Colonial records can testify against colonialism

   The novel argues that records written by outsiders are compromised but not useless. Placed next to Indigenous testimony, they can become evidence for the people they once helped to erase.

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