Catching Teller Crow Study Guide

Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, together with their sibling Blaze, are the children of Australian Aboriginal writer Sally Jane Morgan (born 1951) and her ex-husband Paul Morgan. Ambelin and Ezekiel are of the Palyku people, an Aboriginal people native to Western Australia; their grandmother, Sally Jane Morgan’s mother Gladys, grew up in the Parkerville Children’s Home due to the Australian government’s policy, pursued until the 1970s, of forcibly removing children from Aboriginal families and putting them in group homes or with white adoptive families to “assimilate” them to white Australian culture. Ambelin Kwaymullina, who earned her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Western Australia in 1998, is a scholar who studies law as it relates to indigenous peoples as well as an author of Young Adult novels and children’s books. Ezekiel Kwaymullina, who has dyslexia, largely taught himself to read and dropped out of high school as a young teenager; he subsequently became an author of children’s books and Young Adult novels. Both Ambelin and Ezekiel have co-authored children’s books with their mother Sally Jane Morgan and with each other; Catching Teller Crow (2018) was the first Young Adult novel Ambelin and Ezekiel co-authored with each other.  

In Catching Teller Crow (2018), Isobel Catching’s Australian Aboriginal great-great-grandmother was forced to work for a demeaning white employer after white colonization encroached on her people’s land, while Catching’s great-grandmother and grandmother both belonged to the “Stolen Generations,” children forcibly removed from their Aboriginal families and placed in group homes or with white adoptive families to force assimilation into white Australian culture. White British people began colonizing Australia in 1788. Though they founded a penal colony in New South Wales, colonization remained small-scale until about 1816. From 1816 through the 1800s, the white colonial population began growing and expanding outward into the rest of Australia; their livestock-based agricultural practices, among other phenomena of colonization, infringed on Aboriginal land and disrupted Aboriginal ways of life. In 1869, the white Australian government passed the misleadingly named Aboriginal Protection Act, which allowed government officials to forcibly remove children from Aboriginal families. Subsequently, under various legal pretexts, Aboriginal and mixed-race children were removed from Aboriginal families and placed in group homes or with white adoptive families to facilitate assimilation into white Australian culture from 1869 until the 1970s. In 1981, the Australian historian Peter Read published a book called The Stolen Generations that made the historical phenomenon of Australian Aboriginal children taken from their families by the government much more widely known.

In Catching Teller Crow, Isobel Catching draws on stories her mother told her about her Aboriginal ancestors to find resilience in the face of brutal abuse. Authors Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina are the children of Sally Jane Morgan, an author whose autobiography for children, My Place (1987), relatedly involves the young Morgan learning about her Aboriginal heritage and the life stories of her Aboriginal forebears. In addition, Catching Teller Crow is narrated by a ghost, Beth Teller, who was killed in a car accident before the story takes place. Other novels narrated by dead people include Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), whose narrator was raped and murdered at age 14 and subsequently watches over her family’s grief from heaven, and David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing (2013), a love story between two boys whose narrators are a group of gay men killed by HIV/AIDs. Finally, in Catching Teller Crow, teenage Isobel Catching uses the device of a fantastical allegory to narrate the brutal, likely sexual, abuse she suffered at the hands of local rich man Alexander Sholt and police chief Derek Bell. Another Young Adult novel that uses fantasy tropes to indirectly represent child abuse and its aftermath is Stephanie Kuehn’s Charm & Strange (2013), whose protagonist remembers his molestation by his abusive father in allegorical form, as his father becoming a violent werewolf.