The Yield: A Novel

“Her memory had been good enough to bury the bad thoughts, although reliable enough that the good were sometimes suppressed too.”

In this quote, it is seen what August has had to sacrifice in order to avoid the grief and baggage that her home holds. By isolating herself, she is able to avoid direct interaction with traumatic memories but loses the positive connection to her past and family too.

“‘The family trees of people like us are just bushes now, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Someone has been trimming them good.’ I wouldn’t ever forget these words because they sounded like sad poems. And I guess that’s a true thing, because all the years I’ve lived I’ve lost so many parts of the people who make me up.”

Poppy’s interest in other people and their stories shows the community-mindedness that makes up so much of his motivation. It also shows collective experience, a community trauma that continues through memory.

“Five hundred acres of not being able to shake the past, of where everything had gone wrong, over and over. They’d been returned to their birthplace and it seemed as if their lives had become best-case scenarios.”

August struggles upon returning to Massacre Plains with the onslaught of memories she faces weighing down on her. The remembrances include the baggage that already existed in childhood and the generational trauma that holds the loss of land represents for the Gondiwindis.

“I realise now that no matter what ruin befalls me, this is my pledge: I will tell that unhandsome truth, even if it will amount to last words. The circumstances of the times demand it.”

Although Greenleaf makes a brave resolution here, how far he is able to follow it through is hindered by his role as a product of the colonial paradigm. His view of the truth is different than that of the Indigenous people he sees himself as helping.

Elsie was the captain of the house and Albert the storyteller, but it was the food that they lived for, the food that they shared with every person who stayed or worked in and around the house—food was the centre.”

Elsie and Poppy were dedicated to making the house at Prosperous a place of refuge and community. The key way this is shown is through their relationship with food, with Elsie cooking and Poppy preserving cultural traditions.

1“August hadn’t given the time of day to the sorrow they’d meant to be united by. She could taste the guilt then, it came from her throat, thick and wet and as black and dirty as diesel, welling up around the tongue. She looked around for the smell and the taste, but there wasn’t an engine turning in sight.”

August struggles with processing her emotions, particularly her grief and guilt around leaving Prosperous and Jedda and now Poppy’s deaths. She is unable to relate and connect over these shared griefs even with Elsie, showing how deep the disconnect goes.

“I don’t think so. There was a war here against the local people. In that war the biggest victim was the culture, you know? All this stuff—’ she lifted the wrapped coolamon out in front of her ‘—well, culture has no armies, does it?’ she said.”

Though this statement is true in that the Indigenous culture of Massacre Plains greatly suffered from various colonial outbursts of violence and control, culture has had armies in Poppy and the others dedicated to preserving it. August, too, will join their ranks, cultivating her connection with and concern for her land and culture.

“There were no native plants in the Falstaff garden, only hedges, tulips, half-century-old rose bushes and the fruit grove.”

The garden here is expressive of the differences between the two families. The differences between the Falstaffs and the Gondiwindis are stark in many ways. Where the Falstaffs are cold, the Gondiwindis are warm; where the Gondiwindis have inherited generations of cultural knowledge of the land, the Falstaffs are ignorant and removed from the land. The Falstaffs’ plants have been transplanted to Australia, as they themselves have been.

“But although our work during the first many months was very hard, and our privations continued to be many, these trials did not affect us nearly as much as did the cruel conduct from those around us, people who were professedly Christian.”

Greenleaf is unable to countenance violence of the townspeople toward the Indigenous population in the name of Christianity. He clings to the idea of the civilizing white Christian force, even when it becomes increasingly apparent that this is itself a fallacy and expressive of racist, colonizing impulses.

“Don’t know what it is about us that seems to rile the white man. The burden, the burden of their memory perhaps, or that we weren’t extinguished with the lights of those empires after all. Some days everything seems wamang still.”

The racism the Gondiwindis experience is nonsensical, often based around the idea that they should “go back” to the home that was stolen from them. The implication in the Gondiwindis not “belonging” in their ancestral home is as Poppy says—that they should have died when the white people wanted them to.

“It was simply, painfully, the finality of a time. All along they’d wanted peace, or to be happy, and they are good things to want, especially for children, but they’d been drawn again and again into the past, where all pain lives.”

Generational trauma affected Jedda and August’s move to Prosperous, even though Elsie and Poppy tried to protect them. Though the land holds their history, that is often a history of pain and violence.

“That in the face of loss, only losing oneself seems like an answer.”

August’s struggle with her internal self is compounded by her experiences of grief. The two issues intertwine, leading to her feeling increasingly alienated and alone within herself.

“During this time we continued to instruct the children to ask God to bless them and preserve the Empire in its unity. We taught them to love, honour and respect the country in which they lived, and moreover the flag that waved over them.”

Even as Greenleaf discusses with horror the trauma that the Empire has brought to the Indigenous people of Australia, he can’t recognize the hypocrisy of teaching them to love it. He himself can’t help but hold on to his belief in the British Empire, even as it eventually turns on him.

“Because some people have nowhere else to go back to ever. Just the idea of Prosperous here, when I was away, was a comfort. It’s a place I could always come back to. All that childhood stuff, stuff your parents keep for you, stuff from when you were a kid—there’s nothing of that for me.”

August has just realized how much Prosperous and the land it’s on mean to her. Though Eddie can talk about how much Poppy loved the land, he can’t respect the Gondiwindis’ attitude toward the land when it is inconvenient or incongruous to his own view of it.

“Maybe I won’t finish everything I meant to, but maybe someone else will tomorrow, next day, someday.”

Poppy, though having managed an incredible feat of cultural preservation, knows that he must trust in his community and family to continue the work. Even though trauma can be passed down through time, so too can cultural connections, love, and knowledge.

“Some people had an unwavering conviction that Australia should be united under a common identity, founded on the pioneers, the geography, the flora and fauna—not the immigrant, nor the Native.”

Greenleaf has been forced to more deeply consider issues around identity, belonging, and ostracization now that he himself is facing discrimination for his origins.

“But when the ancestors were in charge of their living and dead bodies they can find the spot, and we take flowers to those holy places. We have always been a civilisation, us.”

Although Poppy must go through all the work of documenting and recording his culture to preserve it and show its history to colonial authorities, he also knows that this justification is not necessary for those within the culture. No matter what the white settlers say, the cultural knowledge he has proves what he always knew—that their culture is complex and important.

“Open road, going somewhere, elsewhere—she loved that feeling. She knew that about herself. She knew she loved leaving more than a drink, more than sex, more than hunger, the books.”

August gains more self-knowledge the longer she is back home. Compared to the haze of guilt and self-denial she lived in at the start of the novel, her ability at this point to recognize her impulses shows growth.

“August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful, not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born.”

There is great frustration in having to repeatedly prove the things that should have been the Gondiwindis’ birthright. The legacy of colonial oppression and violence has trickled down through the years, the “something bad” now a large and consuming mark on their past.

“To be isolated is to be unable to act. That’s what we were—isolated—from our family, from our language, from our cultural ways and from our land.”

Isolation, as Poppy says here, is usually connected to negative feelings and actions. August, isolated in self-imposed exile in England, was lost and stuck in arrested development, never getting over her sister’s disappearance. This parallels the “stolen generation” of Wiradjuri children removed from their families and isolated from their culture.

“As they walked August thought that grief ’s stint was ending. She whispered to Jedda and to Poppy: I am here.”

August, in re-cultivating her connections with the land and with her family, can also re-cultivate connections to the people she has lost. The land ties them together through time and death, combating grief with the feelings of community.

“August understood what her nana meant. She had lost a witness too, someone seeing her. She’d outgrown her big sister. But she’d also found the solace she felt in that moment, on the land, making it personal.”

The losses the Gondiwindi family has experienced parallel each other. Both Elsie and August have now lost their partner. However, August is understanding how to not only move on from grief but also make that connection continue.

“But they said it was embedded in the language of Albert’s dictionary, that with the Reverend’s list and all the words that Albert wrote, and other old people remembering the words too, that it would now be recognised as a resurrected language, brought back from extinction.”

Poppy’s dictionary is a centralized and compounded form of cultural knowledge that had existed for thousands of years. Though he knew its importance, that it has allowed for such cultural knowledge to be recognized and continue on is exactly what he hoped for before his death.