For example, the phrase giya-rra-ya-rra (afraid to speak) leads to a painful story about August’s grandfather and his wife when they tried to take a class of college students to the local swimming pool and the racism they met along the way. This device could have pulled the reader out of the story instead, the words and their descriptions send the reader on a hundred different brief journeys, while propelling the narrative forward. In alternating chapters, the reader gets a firsthand look at a dictionary in the making, one word at a time, narrated by Poppy. What I loved about this novel is the central role language plays within it.
But at that moment … she felt as if she’d awoken from a stony sleep to find herself standing on the edge of something larger than she’d ever been able to see before. That the tremors of their small lives meant nothing. Environmentalists are not about to go down without a fight, a fight that August initially believes is not her fight.Īugust had always thought important events happened in every other country expect for Australia. Meanwhile, a mining company is days away from forcing her family from their ancestral home in western New South Wales. As August revisits her past relationships and painful memories she also begins searching for this manuscript. In the novel, August Gondiwindi reluctantly returns home for the funeral of her grandfather Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi, who had been creating a dictionary of his people’s language, a dictionary suddenly gone missing.
While Dark Emu deconstructs colonial myths about Australian Aboriginal civilizations, The Yield illustrates how these myths were used to justify tearing apart families and cultures.
I didn’t plan to read the nonfiction book Dark Emu shortly before reading the novel The Yield by Tara June Winch.īut I couldn’t think of a better pairing.
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