In 2009 the Australian conservative commentator Andrew Bolt wrote an article for the Herald Sun under the headline: “It’s so hip to be black.”
In it he named several prominent Indigenous figures who he felt had used their heritage to qualify for roles he believed they did not deserve because of their fair skin. One of them was Tara June Winch, who was then – in the words of Bolt – “just 26 and has written only one book, Swallow the Air”. He complained that she had been named an ambassador for the Australia Council’s Indigenous literacy project – which didn’t exist. “Yes, indeed,” Bolt wrote, “because despite her auburn hair and charmingly freckled face, she, too, is an Aborigine, who claims her ‘country is Wiradjuri’.”
You may think there is something unjust in starting with this episode, or with Bolt, to tell you about Tara June Winch. But it is integral to understanding her, her latest book The Yield, and the gaps in her story, which you can fill by reading her fiction but you won’t find answers for here. During our interview, she asks me, again and again, to not include particular details of her life. Some are incredibly personal but some are so seemingly innocuous that I begin to wonder if I will have anything left by the end.
But ask yourself: how would you have coped with being humiliated before your entire nation, when you were actually 25? How would you deal with a lengthy court battle that would reach Australia’s federal court, that would end with your accuser found guilty of contravening the Racial Discrimination Act but who stood defiant on the court steps, refusing to apologise? You might begin to wonder where all your vulnerabilities start and end. You might begin to resist the idea that, because you are in the public eye, you have to share all of yourself with an audience who want to know about the artist but not the art.
We meet in Paris, a long way from Wollongong, where Winch was raised; she lives on a rural property near Nantes with her husband, Arnaud, and teenage daughter, Lila. Now 35, she is incredibly nervous about reception to The Yield, her first novel since her 2006 debut, which was beloved by critics, put on school syllabuses and won awards. But what Winch remembers is reading the first review in the Australian, which implied she had only written it with “white editorial help”.
“I rang my editor and threatened to jump off the roof,” she says. “It really crushed me. I was really vulnerable. I was 22, a single mum. But then everything else was positive.
“I’ve never written anything so commercial, so I am nervous. It means more people loving it or hating it. I should be used to it now, to know it is not an attack on me, but it is really hard, especially when you rip your heart out and put it on the page.”
Spending a decade out of the public eye has allowed her to “grow up”, she says. “I was a little kid. I feel old now. I didn’t have my 20s. And if I don’t make it by the time I’m 40, I’ll go be something else.” She doesn’t feel as though she’s made it already? “Nooo,” she says. “If you look at my bank balance, you’ll know I haven’t made it.” But she’s happy? “Yeah. I love writing. It fucks me though. I put on 35 kilos writing this book. Thirty-five. Once the idea was there, it was this huge burst over one year, getting it all on the page. I had to be manic. I had to not sleep. In that state, I didn’t look after my body or my health. It was only my family and my book, and I disappeared.”
She apologises for “being selfish” and talking about herself so much – in an interview about her own book. But she’s adamant: “This book can’t just be for me. Maybe that’s why I feel uncomfortable about the attention. It’s not for my ego. This is just my heart on a plate. And I want to get it right.”
The Yield spans about 200 years of history but follows the life and cultural heritage of August Gondiwindi, who is “about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties and had nothing to show”. She returns from Europe to her family home in dusty Massacre Plains when her “Poppy”, Albert Gondiwindi, dies of cancer: “[She] knew too that she would return for the funeral. Go back full with shame for having left, catch the disappointment in their turned mouths, go back and try to find all the things that she couldn’t find so many thousands of kilometres away.”
Massacre Plains is a town divided, in “epithets … procured off supermarket shelves”: Chocolate Chips are the “old Mission Gondiwindi north of town”; Vegemite Valley “was where the blackfellas in government housing lived”; and the middle-class, mostly white centre, is dubbed “the Minties”. August gets wind that Albert was researching the Indigenous history of the area, new information that may influence a proposed mining project: “The residents of Massacre gossiped about the mine and how bad it would be for the environment and others bit back that they needed jobs. Though all sides of arguing agreed they were owed something more.”
In 2008 Winch won a prestigious Rolex mentoring scheme, in which she was paired with the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who introduced her to a whole new world of reading; for the first time, she began making links between Greek tragedies, biblical myth and Indigenous dreaming stories. There is footage of them strolling together in Nigeria; Soyinka looks stately, while Winch is soft-spoken and painfully young. (When asked about her win, she told press that she was “stoked”.) Soyinka seemed to have a good measure of his charge: her next novel, he predicted, “maybe it’ll come in 10 years’ time.” After the Carnage, a confident collection of short stories, came in 2016 but made less of an impact; she says it sold only in the hundreds.
Winch alternates between guarded and guileless giving details of her life since she left Australia. When I press her to say more about herself, she says: “What I really want to say is on the page. If people really want to know my small, insignificant opinion on anything … you know what I mean? I don’t want to talk about this because I want to be a good role model. I am a flawed human being. I am a tortured person.”
She talks of writing as though it is a fight with her own mind, forcing herself to stay awake until the early hours to get herself into a new headspace. “You know that moment at 3am, when you’re honest with yourself? And you are almost like a guide for yourself, leading yourself on the right path? I just want to listen to that voice and get on the right path. But I’m not there yet.”
Winch has said that when she writes: “I dredge the gully of what I know best: what burnt me most, what wakes me in my sleep – the value of life.” That life might be quotidian Australiana, though many of her characters are traumatised: by intergenerational grief, racism, sexual abuse, absent parents. Many of them have Indigenous blood. “We carry our ancestors on our backs,” she says, of her fellow Indigenous authors. “We write these stories with our worlds on our shoulders. And that is our burden, for all First Nation writers around the world. All our stories seem really similar because we can’t escape them. These problems, these things that need to be fixed, they’re our stories. That’s why we write similarly.”
Thomas Keneally has apologised for writing in the voice of an Indigenous character in his 1972 novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – yet he has just done it again in his latest book, The Book of Science and Antiquities. Winch says she is tired of big Australian authors “ticking that box, putting in an Indigenous character because it is Australian novel. Richard Flanagan is a good bloke, but some of the big names, I’m sick of them writing books about Indigenous Australia then talking about how they knew nothing about it. We’ve got a problem when writers in their 60s and 70s don’t know the true history of Australia.”
Winch was born a decade after Australia formally ended the policies that created the stolen generations but she is the product of that history; she says her fair skin is not uncommon among the Wiradjuri people owing to those policies, and she has seen firsthand how trauma travels down generations. “I’m trying to write that pain in my family whole, which is in a lot of Indigenous families … ” she says, then trails off. “I’m not going to ignore that drugs and alcohol are escapes for pain. And there is a lot of pain in my family.” She doesn’t want to talk about it, but is resigned to journalists asking. “I know you have to ask. And I don’t deny that I have profited from white privilege because of my skin tone. I’m not delusional, I know I look like my mum and not my father. I get it. I don’t have a problem.” The unspoken end to that is: other people do.
Which brings us back to Bolt. Winch dropped out of the legal action against him as she was interning in New York: “I was so sad. I was too far away. And it was too much for me. I was too young. I just had to take a step back.” On one level she “almost empathises” with him, as she knows race is complex; but “all he had to do was ring my dad, or the local Aboriginal health centre where I went as a kid. It’s fine, it’s OK. But he shouldn’t have said it. If he did a bit more research, he wouldn’t have written that article.”
A third of The Yield is Albert’s Wiradjuri dictionary, a selection of the words that have shaped his people’s history – everything from dhalbu (sap of trees) to nadhadirrambanhi (war). Winch didn’t grow up speaking Wiradjuri, but has learned it with the help of elders like Dr Stan Grant Sr, who was once jailed for speaking his language. “I don’t care about reviews, if he’s happy with it, that’s it,” she says. “And he wants to use The Yield as a teaching tool, so as long as he is happy and my family is happy, that’s it.”
She is donating a percentage of royalties to fund Indigenous language classes, which she considers key to renewing pride among those communities. “Imagine a kid growing up learning an Indigenous language, having a sense of identity and pride from it,” she says. “I can see that for Australia.”
In Australia, she can also see “a new maturity”, where books like Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip – shortlisted for the Miles Franklin literary prize – are selling well to white readers: “Australians want to know the truth of their history. There is a renaissance of truth telling in Australia right now.” But that responsibility may now lie somewhere else, for Winch feels finished after The Yield. She dreams of a “really fun, silly book” and becomes most animated describing her next novel, titled Hotel Vague: commercial science fiction set in a Dignitas-style clinic where mothers who have lost children can have their memories erased. That really doesn’t sound silly, I say. She laughs. “I try to write commercial literary fiction and I make it heavy. One day I’ll write something really fun.”
For now, she is back, nervous to be in the public eye but determined to see it through, vulnerable yet strong. “I don’t have to be scared any more,” she says. “My daughter doesn’t need me as much, and I’ve got all these stories. There’s no way there will be 10 years between books again. This is my time to be prolific.”