Stella Prize - Denise Newton Writes

The Weekend takes place, as you might expect, over a Christmas weekend during which three friends – Jude, Wendy and Adele – come together to clear out the coastal house of their friend Sylvie, who has died. They have been friends for decades and so their efforts are a final act of love for Sylvie. As the weekend progresses, though, their friendships, along with some deeply held beliefs, are tested.

The novel is told through alternating points of view interspersed with the memories of each of the three women. I loved this, because it allows the reader to get ‘into the head’ of all three main characters, and sometimes the same situation or event is recounted from alternate perspectives, giving real insight into their personalities. They are such different women, it seems miraculous that they could have become friends in the first place, let alone kept their connection over a long period of time. There is potent meaning associated with the minutiae of their lives: the food each one contributes to the weekend meals, their choice of (and attitude towards) clothing, the colour of nail polish and the like, become rich metaphors for the circumstances and approach to life of the characters. It is these differences that add tension, conflict and also laugh-out-loud moments to the narrative.

The author weaves in several contemporary issues as her characters move throughout their weekend together: homelessness amongst older single women, dwindling careers and perilous finances, attitudes of younger people towards ‘baby boomers’, dealing with dementia in failing parents, and conversely, the neglect and resentment women can experience from their adult children. There are astute observations on the physical, mental and emotional changes that occur with ageing:

It was true Wendy was further along the timeline of her life than she might prefer. This was obvious, and yet more and more she found, in place of urgency a kind of spongey spaciousness, commanding her to slow down.
The Weekend p207 (ebook version)

A motif for the ageing process is Finn, Wendy’s very old dog which accompanies her. Finn is deaf, incontinent, and suffering from a form of doggy dementia, but Wendy loves him and cannot contemplate having him put down. The women all react to Finn’s presence in ways that describe their personalities. Finn is a perfect symbol of the differences between them but also of the inexorable processes involved in ageing.

The women snipe, argue and resent each other’s idiosyncrasies during their time together, as only people who have known and loved each other for many years can. Yet their deep bonds of friendship and shared experience are clear.

Charlotte Wood demonstrates her profound grasp of the power of language, with acute descriptions of the women and their inner thoughts, including this one, as Wendy imagines how lovemaking between two acquaintances might look:

Wendy imagines him and Sonia wrestling slowly on a bed; one insect carefully devouring another.
The Weekend p259 (ebook version)

Or this:

Wendy looked around the street at the houses, the trees. At the world: the rich, tawdry, unjust, destroyed and beautiful world.
The Weekend p 355 (ebook version)

This novel made me wince in recognition of all-too-common human foibles and at the trials we can subject our friends to. As a ‘woman of a certain age’, there was also recognition of some of the less celebrated aspects of growing older. There is pathos and sadness here, but also material that gave me satisfying belly-laughs and much that had me gasping at the beauty of the language.

The Weekend was published by Allen & Unwin in 2019.

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The Yield (shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize) introduces us to August, a young Wiradjuri woman from a fictional valley in NSW. August returns home when her beloved grandfather (‘Poppy’) dies, after she’d been living in England for some years. The reader quickly realises that August is something of a restless soul running away from – or searching for – several things, including the sorrow and guilt she experienced after the mysterious disappearance of her older sister Jedda, years ago.

The author does not flinch from dealing with the troubling issues and problems that beset many indigenous communities around Australia. In doing so, she places them firmly within the context of inter-generational trauma, the fracturing of families, communities and culture that began with the colonisation of this country by the English just over two hundred years ago. August is dealing with her own childhood memories but also the hints of far bigger events that took place in and around her childhood home. Early in the book, she dreams about her grandfather speaking to her:

…he was telling her that there was a lot to remembering the past, to having stories, to knowing your history, your childhood, but there is something to forgetting it too…There are few worse things than memory, yet fewer things better, he’d said. Be careful.
The Yield p9

This theme of memory is woven throughout the novel in several ways. While we never meet Poppy (Albert Gondiwindi) we are introduced to him through his book, a carefully compiled dictionary of lost words and phrases from the Wiradjuri language. This is such an effective device, bringing the reader as it does into his world view, touching on his own life experiences but also the history of white settlement of his country and the interactions between settlers and Wiradjuri. And his widow, August’s nana Elsie, tells August:

There was a war here against the local people. In that war the biggest victim was the culture, you know?…Please don’t be a victim, Augie. It’s an easy road, that one…The land, the earth is the victim now – that needs an army, I reckon. She’s the one in real trouble.
The Yield pp92, 93

Certainly the valley is now under direct threat by a proposed tin mine that …slithered up like a snake – worse than a snake – ready to make a million, a billion or more for a couple of greedy mates. (p127)

The place names in the novel’s fictional setting are a deliberate reminder of atrocities committed against indigenous people in the not too distant past: Massacre and Poisoned Waterhole Creek (both of which are real place names), Prosperous Mission, which is based on a real Aboriginal mission that operated in the 1880’s. There is also mention of the ‘homes’ to which Aboriginal children were taken after forcible removal from their parents; practices now known as the Stolen Generations.

If in doubt about the extent or veracity of massacres and other atrocities, you may wish to look at the Colonial frontier massacres map of Australia, compiled by the Centre for 21st Century Humanities through University of Newcastle. It is a sobering website.

Another thread running through the story is to do with the fictional Reverend Greenleaf, a Lutheran pastor of German heritage, who founded and ran Prosperous Mission in the 1800’s. During WWI he is the victim of anti-German sentiment and interred, and we read his impassioned plea for the welfare of the Aboriginal people of his district, foreseeing a grim future for them.

All the disparate threads are brought together by the end of the novel and August is left reflecting on the changes brought about within herself. She thinks about her grandfather’s dictionary and the importance of their language:

English had changed their tongues, the formation of their minds, August thought – she’d drifted in and out of herself all that time. The language was the poem she had looked for, communicating what English failed to say
…I’m writing about the other time though, deep time. This is a big, big story, the big stuff goes on forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that’s the real story of time.
The Yield pp306&2

This is reminiscent of the reflections about time made by the Gay’wu Group of Women in their beautiful book Song Spirals. It prompted me to think again about the fascinating differences across human cultures, as well as the similarities.

The Yield was published by Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin Random House Aust) in 2019. It is an accessible story with beautiful language and imagery. It asks some deep questions such as: is Australia mature enough to embrace all aspects of its history, both ancient and more recent?
The Yield is a worthy contender for the 2020 Stella Prize.