The Yield

The novel follows the story of a young Wiradjuri woman returning home to Australia from the United Kingdom to attend a funeral, and finding her ancestral lands threatened by mining. The novel explores language and features a Wiradjuri language dictionary, as well as themes of colonialism, environmental issues and intergenerational trauma.^[3]

• Dedication: For my family.
• Epigraph: "In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organised robbery?" – Saint Augustine

The novel was translated into French in 2020,^[5] Dutch in 2021,^[1] German in 2022,^[6] and Polish in 2023.^[1] After the novel's initial publication by Hamish Hamilton in Australia in 2019,^[7] the book was reprinted in the US (HarperVia, 2020)^[8], UK (HarperVia, 2021)^[1], and Australia (Penguin, 2021).^[9]

Writing in the Australian Book Review, Ellen van Neerven commented: "The Yield is about regaining more than language. There are odes to Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, with the pointed inclusions of bush food, bread, and fishing technology. There are only a few places where Winch’s delivery is too didactic, as when Nana tells August, the author speaking directly down the barrel to the reader, ‘we aren’t victims in this story anymore – don't you see that?'." And she concluded: "The Yield will appeal to many because of the way it unpacks complex themes in an accessible way. Australian rural novels are often humourless sketches with characters more like caricatures, grimly serious or full of despair. Refreshingly, the characters in The Yield are capable of communion, humour, and dignity despite tragedy, sexual violence, and substance abuse. In this deft novel of slow-moving water, they are borne by love, not pity."^[10]

In The Guardian Erica Wagner noted: "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...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."^[11]