The Yield a novel bound in history but in a timeless realm
ideaswithanne.com Necessity forced English upon Aboriginal people, but English still could not carry the full cultural weight of our intact native languages. It couldn’t even carry a broken one. To tell the story of the people that inhabited 500-acres of land as a metaphor for all Australia I had to break timelines into manageable eras, but I soon realised I couldn’t limit myself to a timeline; to tell the whole story, I had to tell the full story, to tell all the things.
The concept of the Dreaming emphasises the eternal nature of time and of all times existing now. This was the greatest challenge of writing The Yield — how can you show time in different layers on the same, unmoved but changing, piece of land?
I had to show time as conceptual by having no bondage to the years within Poppy’s narrative strand, exact references to dates in the Reverend’s strand — as if everything had fixity — and then show the dance of interpretation for August’s contemporary strand. I had to incorporate elements of magical realism and prop them against cold, hard facts. I was trying to build a novel bound in history but in a timeless realm.
