Cirrus@Austlit

'Since the millennium, Indigenous authors have used the novel to address the problematic connection between whiteness and legal notions of ownership in the foundation of settler Australia. Their texts defy the creation of territory as white property and assert Indigenous sovereignty and relation to country. The article discusses this Indigenous intervention in the context of Western concepts of property and their legal institutionalization that produced a universalized, self-governing white subjectivity as the human norm. In the light of this normativity of white property, it traces recent legislative changes in Australia’s dealing with native title claims to land and ownership. These changes are then read against an interpretation of Tara June Winch’s 2019 novel The Yield, which is part of the larger Indigenous conversation about sovereignty and relation to country. I will show that The Yield demonstrates both the fragility and the resilience of Indigenous relations to land, family, and the law. In that sense, I will read the novel as an exploration of how possession is ambivalent and multi-layered: Winch’s characters belong to country as much as it belongs to and goes through them.'

Source: Abstract.