Overview
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021) by Anita Heiss is a work of historical fiction set on Wiradyuri country in central New South Wales, Australia. The first Australian novel to be released with its title in the Wiradyuri language, it is based on true events surrounding the Great Flood of Gundagai in 1852, when the Murrumbidgee River broke its banks and devastated a town built too close to the water, despite the warnings of the local Wiradyuri people. The story follows Wagadhaany, a young Wiradyuri woman who survives the flood only to be uprooted from her family and country, forced to accompany the colonial Bradley family as they resettle in Wagga Wagga. Through her eyes, the novel explores what it means to be dispossessed of land and belonging, to carry the weight of colonial constraint in ordinary daily life, and to dream of a way back to country. A Guardian Australia reviewer described it as “a novel of the myopia and cruelty of ‘good’ intentions” and “a joyful love story, and a literary celebration of the Wiradyuri language, which is woven throughout.” It won the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Prize for Indigenous Writing and was longlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.
Book Review
There is a moment early in ‘Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray’ when the Murrumbidgee River rises, and rises, and does not stop. The year is 1852. The town of Gundagai — built, despite Wiradyuri warnings, too close to the water’s edge — is about to be taken. Anita Heiss gives us this disaster not as spectacle but as reckoning. The river was always going to do this. The Wiradyuri people knew. Nobody listened.
That is the note on which this novel opens, and it does not let you go.
‘Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray’ — the title is in Wiradyuri, and it was the first Australian novel published with its title in an Indigenous language on the cover — translates as River of Dreams. It is a historical novel set on Wiradyuri country in central New South Wales, and it follows Wagadhaany, a young Wiradyuri woman who survives the Gundagai flood of 1852 only to find herself uprooted from her family and her country, forced to accompany the colonial Bradley family as they relocate to Wagga Wagga. She did not choose to go. She was not asked.
This is the reality at the centre of the novel: the quiet, grinding violence of being owned. Not enslaved in the explicit legal sense, but owned in the way that mattered day to day — your labour presumed, your presence presumed, your future presumed. Wagadhaany moves through the Bradley household performing the duties expected of her, and Heiss renders this with a restraint that is more devastating than outrage would be. The dispossession is simply the texture of Wagadhaany’s life. She carries it the way you carry something you cannot put down.
What saves the novel from becoming purely a chronicle of loss is the community Heiss builds around her protagonist. Wagadhaany’s relationships — with her father Yarri (himself a historical figure, a hero of the Gundagai flood), with other Wiradyuri women, and eventually with the stockman Yindyamarra — are rendered with warmth and specificity. These are people who laugh, argue, grieve, and endure. The love story between Wagadhaany and Yindyamarra is unhurried and genuine, and it gives the novel its emotional counterweight.
The Wiradyuri language threaded through the text is not decorative. It grounds the reader in a world that existed before English arrived and continued, stubbornly, beneath colonial imposition. A glossary is provided, but I found myself reading without consulting it too often; the meaning comes through in context, which is surely the point. Language as country. Language as the thing that could not be entirely taken.
One small structural observation: the novel’s final third moves at a noticeably faster pace than what precedes it. Where the middle section lingers, appropriately, in the rhythms of Wagadhaany’s constrained daily life, the resolution feels compressed by comparison. A few threads that had been building are tied off quickly. It is a minor imbalance in an otherwise carefully paced work, and it did not diminish the ending so much as leave me wanting slightly more time in it.
I came to this book through my connection to Kangaroo Island and the broader Australian landscape — a place I have spent years trying to understand through a lens and a quiet attention to what is actually there. Reading Heiss, I was reminded that understanding a landscape always means understanding whose it is. Or was. Or, in a more honest reckoning, still is. The Murrumbidgee runs through this novel the way rivers run through everything — as boundary, as lifeline, as memory, as direction. Wagadhaany dreams along it. It is where she belongs.
There are books that give you information and books that give you understanding.
‘Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray’ is firmly in the second category. It does not lecture. It does not explain the history so much as inhabit it. You come away knowing something about the Gundagai flood, about colonial New South Wales, about the Wiradyuri people — but more than that, you come away having spent time with a character whose inner life is fully realised, whose desires and griefs feel real, whose courage is not the capitalised kind but the quiet kind that gets a person through an ordinary week under extraordinary constraint.
It is the kind of book I want to press into people’s hands. I suspect I will.
Dr Anita Heiss AM is a member of the Wiradyuri nation of central New South Wales and one of Australia’s most prolific and well-known authors, publishing across genres including non-fiction, historical fiction, commercial fiction, and children’s fiction. She is a Professor of Communications at the University of Queensland, an Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and the GO Foundation, and Publisher at Large of Bundyi, an imprint of Simon & Schuster dedicated to cultivating First Nations talent. Across more than two decades of publishing, Heiss has been a consistent and outspoken advocate for the presence of First Nations voices in Australian letters.
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