In the more conventional narrative, a young woman, August, has returned to her grandparents’ house in the heat-addled settlement of Massacre Plains to bury her beloved grandfather, ‘Poppy’ Albert.

More immediately impactful, for me at least, were the sections of the novel that deal directly with language and gave me characters I could empathise with. Thanks to Greenleaf, the reader is all too aware that much is being left out: there is pain here, but it hovers beneath the surface, forcing us to look closer and confront events that have historically been swept under the carpet. Having read the author’s note, however, I began to see this detached, outsider’s tone as significant: a remnant of the dominant narrative which, though kindly meant in the reverend’s case, is not the voice that should be permitted to tell this story. As I was reading, I often found his rather distanced voice frustrating – he touches regularly upon the shocking treatment of Aboriginal Australians by white settlers, but often seems to be glossing things over. The additional context made me look back over certain sections of the novel with fresh eyes – particularly those containing a letter written by Reverend Greenleaf, a German-born missionary who sets up a home for Aboriginal women and children shortly after the outbreak of World War I. Nor, despite their unequal weighting in terms of word count, does one necessarily seem more important than the others – though readers will no doubt have their favourite, each adds something essential to the story, and the links between them are so carefully formed that it is easy to slip between different voices, periods and narrative styles.Īdmittedly, my opinion in this regard was influenced by the author’s note at the end of the book, in which she writes briefly about the history of the Wiradjuri people and language. To say that it is multi-layered would be an understatement, yet somehow these very different narrative threads never get in the way of one another. Divided into three interwoven sections, Winch’s novel spans a period of roughly a century and tells both personal and community histories from the perspective of insiders and those standing on the periphery.

The yield tara june winch review