Review of 'The Yield' by Tara June Winch

In her Barry Andrews address at the recent Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, Wiradjuri writer and scholar Professor Anita Heiss exhorted academics who teach and write about Aboriginal literature to commit to raising awareness about Aboriginal literacy and languages in their work. She also suggested donating to or fundraising for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation which, among other things, produces and publishes books by Indigenous people for Indigenous people.

Professor Anita Heiss’s call to action.

I started reading Aboriginal literature at university. My education expanded exponentially when I started reading and reviewing for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (proving that you don’t have to go to uni to read Aboriginal peoples’ writing!). So although of late I have wondered whether it is apposite to apply the tools of literary criticism, which have a European lineage, to Aboriginal texts (particularly given the colonial baggage of those tools), I still think it’s really important for non-Aboriginal readers to engage with Aboriginal literature to educate ourselves about Australian history, Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal languages. 

Although it has been postponed this year due to Covid, this past week was due to be NAIDOC week. During this week, Lisa of ANZLitLovers encourages litbloggers to read and engage with Indigenous literature across the world. As this is an online initiative, it didn’t have to be cancelled! Over the past few years I have been too overworked and exhausted to do any reviews, but due to my Covid-19 reboot I’ve read and thought about Tara June Winch’s The Yield (which we also did in bookclub at Avid Reader).

The Yield, Winch’s third work and first novel, is a book about words, particularly Ngurambang, ‘the word for country in the old language, the first language’ (1). The book begins and ends with this word, signalling the continuation of country because, as Albert Gondiwindi, a collector of Wiradjuri words, signals, he’s writing about ‘deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that the real story of time’ (2).

The story is made up of three narratives: Albert Gondiwindi’s first person narrative and dictionary entries in Wiradjuri and English; the third-person story of August Gondiwindi, Albert’s granddaughter, who returns to Australia from England following Albert’s death and who is haunted by the loss of her sister; and a long letter written by Reverend Ferndinand Greenleaf in 1915, describing his attempts at creating a missionary for the Gondiwindi people. These three stories knit together at the book’s close, in which the action speeds up dramatically in a protest against a tin mine to be opened on Ngurambang.

A major theme in the book is the body, with which Ngurambang is bound. As Albert  writes, ‘If you say [Ngurambang] right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words’ (1). He also observes that his country ‘had a plan for me, already mapped in my veins since before I was born’ (1). The blood is in the word, which is in the veins, in the body, in the land.

Thus I read August’s under-nourishment as synchronous with, and linked to, the gradual drying of the Murrumby River since colonisation. As Augustine writes in his entry for ‘river – bila’:

Now you know where the word billabong comes from. From us. Everything comes back to the bila – all life, and with it all time. Our songlines originate there, our lives fed from there and it’s where our spirits dwell in the end. Even the Reverend was drawn to the river, there he recited Isiah 44:3, For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring, an my blessing on your descendants. Can’t imagine how it hurts not to see that water come anymore. (106)

 Language is bound up with bodies, because language comes from country, and country nourishes the body. When the novel’s sequence of events are resolved, August is returned to her body. She listens to a tape made by Albert of the old language. It is ‘his recital, his private sermon, going through a list of words, trying as he did to work out or remember how they were pronounced’ (306). Hearing this language, ‘the smells, tastes and burdens left August. She ate again, too, she wasn’t ngarran anymore. English changed their tongues, the formation of their minds, August thought – she’d drifted in and out of herself all that time. The language was the poem she had looked for, communicating what English failed to say’ (306). This sustenance also comes from the sound of the words, as Aboriginal culture is an oral culture, although as Penny van Toorn has illustrated, Aboriginal people were very quick to pick up writing once that technology was available to them.

August and her cousin Joey print out the pages of the book for the local kids, and write in the Foreword: Maybe you are looking for a statue, or a bench by the banks of the Murrumby to honour the people who have lived by the river. Better, there is water returning, nudging what was dead. Better the burral-gang congregate here often. Better these words and better we are still here and that we speak them. (310)

I thought this was interesting in the context of the recent debates about statues. There are different ways to commemorate history, not just through cast iron figures. Cultures with oral histories, where memory is passed down by story, have different ways of remembering & commemorating to Westerners, who seem to like monuments (as for me, I am indifferent: the span of history is so long that humans are but a speck, and a statue memorialising a speck doesn’t mean much to me). This passage shows that Wiradjuri people have resisted colonisation and that they are still sustained by their country, by memory, and by language.

As was pointed out in our bookclub meeting, The Yield is a generous book. Many of the missionaries in Australia sure didn’t abide by their Christian principles, as Claire G. Coleman details in Terra Nullius, and many of the girls’ and boys’ homes in which Aboriginal children were institutionalised during the Stolen Generations (and, arguably, still are), ‘were much harsher in comparison to those depicted’ in the novel (Winch, 340). Winch shows a missionary who was influenced by the Gondiwindi people and wrote down their language. This doesn’t mean he was an entirely good person, as an exchange between August and her aunt Missy reveals:

‘He was kind, you think?’ [August asks].

‘No. He was bad in a long pattern of bad. I reckon he just thought he was doing right.’

‘He regretted it.’

‘Yeah, but only when it happened to him, aye.’ (250).

So I think it’s interesting that Winch includes the lines from Isiah in the definition of billabong. Perhaps she’s trying to use Christianity, which with white Australians might be familiar, to explain a concept from Aboriginal culture. It’s generous, because Aboriginal people shouldn’t have to do this work – there’s hundreds of books out there that folk can pick up and read to learn about Aboriginal culture.

At the same time, even if Winch doesn’t go into great details about massacres and rapes (although these are present in the book), she does canvas the casual racism that Aboriginal people experience. While standing in the fish n’ chips shop, August looks at a man’s tattoo of the Southern Cross, inked onto his shoulder.

       ‘You like that?’ he asked her, pointing to it, without waiting for an answer. ‘That’s the Southern Cross, lady. That means you don’t belong here.’

        She stood there dumbfounded, blank-faced. After a moment she wondered who he thought she was, or who exactly he thought he was. (237).

A subtle way of revealing ignorance.

My favourite part of this book is the dictionary: I loved the Wiradjuri words and the stories used to explain them, such as ‘flower, a kind of flower – babin, narranarrandyiran The banksia flower is my favourite, not just because it’s large and proud looking like the hibiscus, but because it reminds me of something bigger. See, the banksia is a tough-looking flower but it still protects itself with sharp, jagged leaves, study wood and roots. Its nectar feeds the bees, the birds and us people’ (206). A plant is always bigger than a human, because without sugar and oxygen from plants, humans can’t survive, so I liked this interpretation.

The writing in the dictionary section is much more alive and vibrant than that of the Reverend’s letters, which came across as flat and two-dimensional. Perhaps that was the point, but I skimmed a lot of those letters – he didn’t seem real to me.

A few other thoughts: there were bits that made me laugh. When August asks her Aunt Missy, ‘You think you’ll go to heaven, Aunty?’, Missy replies, ‘Nah! I’ll be back as a tree or something that doesn’t move. I just want to chill out and not have to go hunting for food, you know?’ (249). I agree: trees are something to aspire to. I also wondered if this book was a shout out to Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, with the name of the towns Prosperous and Massacre Plains echoing Wright’s Desperance, and the gathering of activists at the end of The Yield also mirroring the blowing up of the mine in Carpentaria. I dunno, but I liked the use of allegory.

When Black Lives Matter exploded in America, and people marched against inaction over Deaths in Custody in Australia (437 deaths since 1991 and not a single conviction! It’s staggering), readers rushed to bookshops to buy books by Aboriginal writers. I find that really heartening, but there also needs to be concrete action - for example we should, as Anita Heiss stresses, we should amplify Aboriginal peoples’ voices. So don’t just read this (rather hamfisted) review - go out and buy the book.

Review of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms

Anita Heiss’s latest novel opens with a man running from a prison: the Japanese internment camp of Cowra in 1944. Hiroshi finds safety with an Aboriginal family, who hide and care for him. Gradually, a romance develops between Hiroshi and Mary Williams, the young Aboriginal woman who takes him food.

Heiss writes what she calls ‘choc-lit’ – or chick lit with an Aboriginal focus – but you would foolish to dismiss this as fluff. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, is always firmly focused on educating audiences about Aboriginal culture and the ongoing effects of colonialism and racism. She’s a smart woman: popular fiction is one of the most widely read genres, and by inserting her themes into her popular novels she aims to inform a wide range of readers.

This is a difficult road to take, as readers of this genre pick up books expecting to be entertained. If there’s a whiff of anything otherwise, they don’t care for it. I don’t think that will be a problem for readers of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, for in this work Heiss blends popular fiction and politics beautifully. 

There are two main techniques she uses to achieve this. The first is Hiroshi’s point of view. By using a character who knows nothing of Aboriginal culture, who is initially ‘suspicious as to why these dark people are helping him and where they actually come from’ but who grows to love them deeply, Heiss articulates how race is a construct and that hunger, kindness, fear, homesickness and desire are qualities that belong to us all.

The second technique is the use of metaphor, specifically that of imprisonment. The prison from which Hiroshi escapes represents not only the physical camp for internees, but also the camps on which Aboriginal people were forced to live – the mission stations and reserves – when their land was taken from them. As Banjo, Mary’s father, says, ‘We are treated like prisoners too, at Erambie. We shouldn’t be on rations. We should all be paid the same for the same work and have enough money to buy food for our families – not just flour, tea and sugar rations and whatever we can hunt or manage to grow. It’s not fair for anyone. The prisoners of war are just like us’.

Heiss also addresses contemporary concerns, such as negative representations of Aboriginal people in the media. Merv, a singer and football player, makes a name for himself in Sydney and is written up in the paper. Mary, who reads the article about him out to the family, comments ‘At least this is a positive article about Aboriginal people. You’re always saying what they write about us is bad, Mum.’ And in Mary’s family itself there is much to be proud of. The Williams take in a stranger and scrimp to find food for him, as many Aboriginal people did for Europeans they were shipwrecked on Australia’s coasts. They take an interest in Hiroshi and his culture, as Noongars did in whalers and the first colonists when they arrived in south west Western Australia (Kim Scott writes about this beautifully in That Deadman Dance). At the same time they aren’t saints, for no one is. Through Kevin, who is jealous and has a temper, Heiss shows that every family has its arguments, and that different viewpoints need to be aired before one can arrive at a resolution. 

At the heart of the novel is an important emotion: empathy. Romance is definitely important too, not least because it drives the plot, but without empathy, romance can’t happen. Empathy often takes some work – intellectual as well as emotional. As Banjo exhorts his brother Kevin, ‘What if our brother escaped from a POW camp like this bloke? Wouldn’t you want someone to look after him and treat him like a human being?’ And this is what the novel does, as all good literature should do: it takes us out of our everyday lives and into a new world, where we become invested in and learn to care for its people. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues for the importance of including emotion in philosophy, writes in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), novels invite us to ‘concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’ (xvi). And this in turn is a precondition for respect for human dignity (xvi).

So if you’re reading this book by the beach (and I hope you are!), you’ll not only enjoy the plot and characters (perhaps woven with the smell of salt and sunscreen and the sounds of kids yelling), but you’ll also quietly exercise your heart as well.

This is my seventh review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Not Just Black and White

In February this year, on another balmy Brisbane evening, I went off to Avid Reader to listen to a panel discussion, ‘Indigenous Women Writing Their Stories’ presented by The Stella Prize and black&write. The courtyard was packed, the stars were out, the wine was cold and the panelists were fantastic.

Ellen van Neerven, author of the wonderful Heat and Light, hosted the session, which included Lesley and Tammy Williams, winners of the 2014 David Unaipon award for Not Just Black and White; Melissa Lucashenko, author (most recently) of Mullumbimby; and black&write intern Yasmin Smith. It was a wonderful, stimulating evening. Tammy told a joke about how their book was mistaken for one by the Williams sisters (of tennis fame) in a store (obviously not Avid!).

At the end of the evening, I stepped onto the bus with a copy of Not Just Black and White and started to read. The authors are a mother-daughter duo, and their stories are braided together into a dialogue. The work opens with Lesley’s narrative, which highlights the centrality of place to her identity: ‘The sound of water droplets hitting the geranium leaves brought back childhood memories of rain beating down on the tin roof back home in Cherbourg’ (1). Cherbourg was the Aboriginal settlement in Queensland in which she grew up. The opening passage also provides what was to become one of Lesley’s (and therefore the work’s) driving forces – the search for Aboriginal people’s missing wages and savings that were held in ‘trust’ by the government.

The book is subtitled A conversation between a mother and daughter, and Lesley’s account is in conversation with her daughter Tammy. Lesley began telling her story to Tammy when Tammy was a teenager. She initially spoke into a tape recorder because she would ‘always clam up whenever it came time to put pen to paper’ (3) and thought this was due to her limited education but, as Tammy explains, it was also because Aboriginal culture is an oral culture and Aboriginal people of Lesley's generation were more accustomed to passing stories and memories down through recollection and speech. In the book, Tammy responds to each of her mother’s sections, bringing in her insights as she grows up and becomes a lawyer. Her mother’s personal story, she says, ‘was as entwined in mine as mine was in hers’ (4).

Lesley describes growing up in Cherbourg, the closeness of her family and how they often used humour to survive; her growing awareness of the divisions between races and how this was tied to class; how she went out to work as a domestic servant in the country and in Brisbane and worked hard for no pay, except maybe a ticket to the movies; her evening as a debutante in a lovely dress; her marriage to a man who was initially very good and kind but suffered from depression, which killed him. Lesley then needed to work even harder to support her family, but she was tough and determined. She became an Aboriginal teacher’s aide and she showed Tammy that a girl could be anything she wanted.

Although Tammy also worked hard, she ‘hardly ever saw Indigenous people in the kind of roles I imagined could be for me’ (179). Michael Jackson, however, was one of the first images of a successful black person that she saw. In the Cosby show, she found that the wife of Dr Huxtable was a lawyer. ‘It seemed irrelevant,’ Tammy writes, ‘that the Huxtables were a different kind of black people in a different country. I identified more with this fictitious black family living on the other side of the world that the people I saw regularly on the local streets’ (181). And in this way she had ‘a clear image of at least one professional black woman I wanted to be like’.

Tammy was teased at school, while her mother was continued her fight for stolen wages. Needing to express the continuing injustice she experienced and witnessed, Tammy wrote an essay about racism and the need for role models, which she submitted to a competition run by Michael Jackson’s Heal the World Foundation, and won! She and Lesley travelled to a conference at Neverland and then around America, before attending the World Summit of Children in San Francisco. While travelling, they also learned of similarities between the experiences of Indigenous Australians and ethnic Americans, who were also dispossessed of their land. On their return to Australia, Tammy and Lesley were invited to speak at the United Nations Human Rights Council Headquarters in Geneva, and their community rallied around to help them finance the trip.

In Geneva, Lesley gathered her courage and spoke to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on this trip about Indigenous people’s stolen wages. After this, she figured she could speak to anyone, including the Queensland premier. On her return to Australia, she continued her fight, working with researchers who estimated the amount of the lost wages. She compiled media kits; and organised rallies and community meetings amidst some hostility from white people (Pauline Hanson was enjoying her first flush of power) and from some of the Indigenous community as well. She accessed the government records relating to her family, but the documents she needed most were ‘noticeably missing’ (306). Finally, with the help of an Indigenous woman, Kerrie Tim, the executive director of the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy, and her policy advisor, Lesley obtained the passbook showing her savings. It had been held in a safe that had belonged to the former director of Native Affairs. Even despite this evidence, the Queensland government was prepared to fight Lesley in court - the racism that confined Indigenous people in settlements such as Cherbourg was clearly continuing. Eventually, however, the government offered an apology and compensation not just to Lesley, but also to individual claimants.

This was a great book to read. I found Lesley’s account more gripping, perhaps because her recollections were more detailed and descriptive, and her tenacity, intelligence and lateral thinking were incredible. That the passbook was kept locked in a safe also speaks volumes, as does the government's reticence to redress injustice. But Tammy’s account showed how the past moulds the future, and that the qualities parents learn shape their children too. I was glad that this book not only won the David Unaipon award, which meant it could be published, but also the Queensland Premier's award for a Work of State Significance in this year’s Queensland Literary Awards – it means that, although we still have a long way to go, representations of Queensland’s history are finally becoming more inclusive.

This is my fourth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

#fundTrove

A few weeks ago, I presented at a symposium on Queensland Modernism on writer Dorothy Cottrell, who spent her life in a wheelchair and whose 1929 novel The Singing Gold was a sensation. After the symposium I was approached by a scholar who knew about my project on 19th century Western Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy.

‘Did you know,’ he asked, ‘that her husband was responsible for a massacre of Aboriginal people?’

‘What! No way, there’s been three biographies written on her, and none of them have mentioned him instigating a massacre.’

It transpired that this scholar had refereed a journal article by a playwright, Angela Campbell, who had written a play on Georgiana. An anthropologist named Howard Pederson had approached Campbell and asked her if she knew about the massacre. Like me, her reaction was one of surprise. In all of the research she had undertaken on Georgiana, and of the many people she had spoken to about her, there was no mention of John Molloy (who had fought at Waterloo) ordering a massacre. Pederson directed her to W.B. Kimberly’s History of West Australia, published in 1897. Kimberly described how, in retaliation for the spearing of John Layman by an Aboriginal man (whom Layman had antagonised), Captain Molloy ‘ordered his soldiers to march, and he took command of them and the chief settlers in the south west district. He gave special instructions that no woman or child should be killed, but that no mercy should be shown the men’.

While I was aware of this incident, I hadn’t known that John Molloy had instigated the violence. Campbell was astonished that this fact had been covered up, as was I. And so too was historian J.S. Battye, who wrote a more circumscribed account of the event when he published his 1924 history of the state, Western Australia: a history from its discovery to the inauguration of the Commonwealth.

When I went searching for more information on what had happened, I turned to Trove, a free online service provided by the National Library of Australia which includes information on over four million books, articles, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives, datasets and more. Following a series of articles published in the Western Mail in 1925, I found that Battye was taken to task for besmirching John Molloy’s name and for asking why, ‘where possible, accounts of [the incident] have been suppressed, and where that was not possible that the accounts have been watered down’. There was no answer to this, except for a heated reply from AG Layman, the grandson of John Layman, who wrote in August 1925 'I was well acquainted with many of the natives that were at Wonnerup when my grandfather was murdered, and I did not have to go to old Wheela for information. Wheela was too young at the time to know much about it, and at the most he was a most unreliable man.' Wheela was at least 86 in 1925 (on the presumption that he might have been at least two when the event happened); even if he was too young to witness a massacre his people would have known about it.

To me, this was a fascinating example of how history can be distorted by the valuing of some voices and the denigration of others. Historically, testimony by Aboriginal people has been dismissed because it is oral history. And yet the stories of some Aboriginal people are about climactic events that occurred thousands of years ago, and which contemporary scientists have corroborated.

I would never have been able to find this information without Trove, a service which, in yet another example of our government’s slow starvation of our arts and culture, is now facing funding cuts (and of course this is a government that will never tax rich corporations instead). As former manager of Trove writes of the service, ‘Our history is not in the past – it lives as a source of inspiration and unease, understanding and critique. Trove helps me to connect to that. I want it to be safe, and I want it to grow.’

The searches that I did on Trove show clearly how it can help us to critique and understand the past. Also, on a practical level – it’s online. With travel being expensive and polluting, this makes it an accessible, useful resource for scholars all over Australia.

There is a petition going around to #fundTrove, which you can sign. You can also tweet or write about the value of Trove, as I have done. And you can write to Senator Fifield or other government ministers. The people at the eScholarship Research Centre at Melbourne University have already drafted a sample letter.

Trove is an amazing resource. Please help us to keep it.