The Yield Quotes
"If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words."
"Yet nothing ever really dies, instead it all goes beneath your feet, beside you, part of you."
"What a companion the dictionary is – there are stories in that book that’ll knock your boots off."
"My entire life has been galing and yura. Even in the Boys’ Home we used to have to bless our meals, mostly served with johnnycakes, or dense bread."
"That tin don’t love anyone or anything back."
"I think we don’t have that word at all."
"‘You may.’ She said after that uncertain pause where she’d been thinking of meat and two veg for dinner, ‘Get me the beans from the fridge, and you fix the potatoes.’"
"I’d think of my minhi across the country in the Girls’ Home and my urine would run like quicksilver over the hessian cots, onto the stone floors to wake my schoolmates."
"The paper listed other recent extinctions. And just like that she thought, zip! Gone!"
"I realise now that no matter what ruin befalls me, this is my pledge: I will tell that unhandsome truth, even if it will amount to last words."
"My Father was to join the vinedressers with his abundant knowledge of tilling the earth and producing table wine."
"Mother conducted her own business in town on Wednesday afternoons, when the wives brought their homemade butter, cheese and honeycomb to sell."
"Perhaps fifteen good families were known to my own. All were very fluent in the English language, and their interests at all times were to be enfranchised in the fine country where we’d settled."
"I believe it was then, having seen those depths of desperate subsistence, that I felt sincerely compelled to help the Aborigine of the camps."
"I subsequently reported myself to the indisposed Bishop of the Uniting Church, whom I soon judged to be a gentleman in the true sense of the word."
"‘Reverend Greenleaf, I have often thought what a sin it must be for Christian ministers to pass through these parts and never to speak a word to the poor Blacks.’"
"I threw myself upon my knees, and wept before God, and said: ‘O Lord, show me Thy way, teach me Thy path, tell me what to do for these perishing Aborigines.’"
"The conversation sent me to my room filled to overflowing with the wants and woes of these unhappy people."
"That vile inhumanity practised by the white-skinned Christian on his dark-skinned brother in order to obtain land and residence, for ‘peaceful acquisition’ – that includes capture, chains, long marches, whipping, death on the roadside, or, if surviving all these – the far more terrible fate – being sold like brutes of the field as unpaid labour to the highest bidder."
"How could it be that Australia, professedly the new home of liberty and light, had become a theatre of oppression and cruelty?"
"They even lost prayer, but they weren't going to stop trying for their family."
"Every family has its own special language, its own weird sense of humour that's stuck in the past."
"At the turn of the seventh year of the Mission, a great disruption seemed to take hold of the community."
"She didn’t look at herself for long, she hadn’t ever. Since the age of nine maybe, on account of her lazy eye."
"And if there was water in the Murrumby, the frogs would still gather there today and sing two different tunes from either side of its banks."
"She thought that she probably hadn’t looked into her own eyes, or anyone else’s, or even a camera shutter, for longer than one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi."
"The music to Jedda’s dance. Chanting girls’ voices: Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, they sang that, Balang gaanha bungang burra-mi, bungang burra-mi, bungang burra-mi…"
"Poppy, she said out loud; Jedda, she said on the inside."
"The whole world seemed to stop then: the cicadas went quiet, leaves stopped rustling, chairs didn’t creak."
"It was as if she’d missed out on a version of him."
"I think we did it because when the house ran on tank water there used to be sediment at the bottom of the glass, so you never drank the last bit."
"The ancestors showed me how they cooked in the gulambula."
"The murnong has the yellow, firework-shaped flower, and the tubers that grow under the ground you dig like carrots."
"Biyaami, or Baiame, has such feet – sometimes in my dreams I float around with useless hands and feet."
"I feel like your parents are going to come home and I’ll have to sneak out the back door."
"Everything I ever wanted," she said, sitting at the foot of the bookshelf, swigging at the bottle.
"I think he’ll go somewhere, but I don’t think there’s a heaven."
"It’s silly. Doesn’t change anything whatever we believe."
"It was a slave yard, August, where all your grannies and poppies learnt to be servants and fence builders."
"You wouldn’t get me out there in front of a bloody ten-tonne truck."
"For God’s sake, August, the garden is on fire and you’re worried about a book?"
"Take your things, this place’ll go up like a tinderbox if the wind changes."
"A person exists beyond the living and the dead, in the planes of time where gods roam."
"I’m not doing anything illegal – I’m still on probation, cousin."
"People do it because it makes life easier but they also do it out of respect."
"We’re just the world’s quarry of choice and I don’t see any way around that."
"The evidence and all that heavy rain meant the mine was delayed."
"The river and what happened at the river was a time traveller, their story has no bounds in time."
"Better these words and better we are still here and that we speak them."
"I wouldn’t be invisible anymore, none of us would be."
"We don’t have to be giyal-dhuray anymore, we don’t have to pass that down anymore."
"Ngurambang is my country; in my mind it will always be on the waterfront."