Rosanne Kennedy (ANU):
The Deep Present. Sovereignty, Language, and Place in Tara Jane Winch’s The Yield
June 4, 2024
4pm, IG 4.141
“I am writing because the spirits are urging me to remember, and because the town needs to know that I remember, they need to know now more than ever before.”
The Yield
Tara Jane Winch’s novel, The Yield, is concerned with memory, language, and sovereignty, and their significance in the present. The novel draws on and is informed by historical records, oral storytelling and the sustaining memory of Aboriginal presence on Country through deep time. In weaving these together it moves between times: from the deep past to the colonial past, and sits with the material and felt impacts of pasts in the contemporary present, narrating the reclamation of Wiradjuri language and simultaneously circulates the language into the reading public through the form of the novel.
In this paper, we draw on the methods of cultural memory studies and historiography to consider the novel’s merging of genres of realism and romance – a potent combination in historical fiction – and its creation of powerful characters to carry the story of struggle and survival across cultural and temporal borders. Through its form, The Yield develops innovative ways of engaging with and transmitting the remembered experience of the past, drawing out its cultural and political significance in the present. We argue that what is distinctive and important is the novel’s cultural imaginary of this deep present, achieved through its transmission of and layering of different temporalities – the deep past, the settler colonial past, and the capitalist colonial present.
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