It’s “bittersweet” to win the Miles Franklin award, says Tara June Winch. “I would have liked to see Tony win.”
Winch’s 2019 novel The Yield was announced the winner of the Miles Franklin on Thursday afternoon via a livestreamed YouTube ceremony, as befits the era of the coronavirus pandemic – and to accommodate the fact that the Wiradjuri writer is currently living in France.
Winch’s novel was shortlisted for Australia’s most well-known literary prize along with the work of five other writers, but it’s Tony Birch’s novel The White Girl that is foremost in her mind. “Tony’s my mentor so it just feels really strange,” she says.
When she talks about the collegiality Birch and last year’s Miles Franklin winner, Melissa Lucashenko, have shown towards her, she is briefly overcome. “They’ve been around my whole career. They’re so special to me,” she says.
Birch, in particular: “I did a writing workshop led by Tony [in 2014] and that was hugely influential in me continuing writing. I was about to give up, to be honest.”
The Yield took her a decade to write. In awarding her the $60,000 prize, the judging panel praised the novel as “haunting and accomplished”. “It broke my heart to write it,” Winch says.
The Yield tells the story of August Gondiwindi, who returns home after a decade for her grandfather’s burial, and discovers that her hometown is to be repossessed by a mining company. In seeking to make amends, August dives deep into her family’s history, their country and its language. But Winch avoids summarising the novel by plot or conceit. “There’s no elevator pitch for the book,” she says. “It’s about language at its heart. It’s about decolonising the tongue.”
When asked what she hopes readers will take away from it, she says: “Truth.”
“I don’t really like fiction so much,” she says. “I prefer nonfiction. I wanted to write a book that was as nonfiction as possible. A handbook for native title, a handbook for truth.”
She suggests that perhaps fiction writers’ insistence that they are writing truth – despite fiction being, by its nature, of the imagination – is “a little bit of inadequacy” at the thought that “they’re doing this fanciful creative thing”.
“Maybe it’s trying to convince the reader that there’s actual weight to the book,” she says. “But this is true, every historical violence was word for word. So the language is true, the history of the language was true, what colonisation did to that part of Australia is true. So there’s a lot of historical fact in it, that’s more my point of truth. You can learn a lot from it; I learned a lot from writing it.”
The feedback she has received, she says, bears this out: people are learning things from her book and gaining a connection to Australia’s collective past. “Even just to roll those [Wiradjuri] words in their mouth … it’s a way of connecting back to a shared history and a really respectful, clear way to connect to country and culture and to be proud.”
Four previous nominees for the prize – Birch, Carrie Tiffany, Peggy Frew and Philip Salom – and one newcomer, John Hughes, joined Winch in the shortlist for this year’s Miles Franklin, which recognises a novel of “the highest literary merit” that presents “Australian life in any of its phases”.
The judging panel was led by Mitchell librarian of the State Library of New South Wales, Richard Neville, who was joined by journalist Murray Waldren, academic and critic Melinda Harvey, bookseller Lindy Jones, and author and critic Bernadette Brennan.
“It’s nice to get the recognition,” Winch says, about what she calls the “groundswell” of interest in Indigenous writers and writers of colour over the past 15 years, and how she perceives Australia’s literary prizes, including the Miles Franklin, are beginning to reflect that. “It’s just about bloody time, you know? Because we’re writing so well. We really are. Our poets are the best poets in the country. I don’t know why some of Australia doesn’t believe it, or thinks it’s some sort of gesture or tokenistic thing – a box that has to be ticked.”
She describes reading book bloggers commenting on Birch and her shortlisting: “Oh, it’s fashionable, it’s PC, of course they’re there. Like, fuck you! It’s not fashionable, it’s our fucking heart and soul! It’s so offensive to have First Nations storytellers, descendants of the first people here, on this country, be told, ‘Oh it’s just very PC’. It boggles the mind.”
Publishers could be doing more to reissue titles from the 1960s and 70s, she says, “because that’s how our literature was really born – influenced by the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s in America. We have a back catalogue. We haven’t just come out of nowhere in the last decade.”
She calls for Indigenous editors but also translators in major publishing houses to help draw out the stories of those for whom English isn’t their first or even third language.
“If we really want to hear that whole song of Australia that’s what needs to happen,” she says. “Having our languages become normalised and celebrated is going to positively affect our future generations. It will psychologically change them. Having a linguistic connection to the past doesn’t just change the tongue, it changes the heart and the mind.”