Abuse of Power, Racism, and the Law Theme Analysis

In Catching Teller Crow, racist power structures enable the abuse of Australian Aboriginal people, particularly girls—and while the law sometimes holds abusers to account, it often perpetuates injustice. From the late 1860s into the 1970s, the Australian government passed laws and policies encouraging the forcible removal of children from their Aboriginal families to facilities (or, sometimes, adoptive families) that tried to assimilate the children to white Australian culture. While the novel takes place after these government practices have ceased, they hang over the novel, as major character Isobel Catching’s Aboriginal great-grandmother Sadie and grandmother Leslie were both taken from their mothers by the government. Moreover, violence against Aboriginal girls tacitly condoned by the police forms a major part of the novel’s plot. Twenty years before the story’s main events take place, white teenagers Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell kidnap, abuse, and murder a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl named Sarah Blue. Gerry Bell, the local police chief and Derek’s father, intentionally botches the investigation into Sarah’s disappearance—and gets away with it because Sarah is Aboriginal, not white. Derek becomes the police chief after his father to help cover up his own crimes against girls—and when Alexander and Derek kidnap Isobel Catching 20 years later, she psychologically withstands their abuse by remembering her female ancestors’ strength in the face of white colonization and the government’s assaults on Aboriginal family integrity, drawing a parallel between the government’s legal persecution of Aboriginal people and Alexander and Derek’s predation of Aboriginal girls. While detective Michael Teller and local police officer Allie Hartley eventually discover Alexander and Derek’s crimes and seek justice for their victims, the novel presents them as unusually moral and anti-racist police officers due to their relationships with Aboriginal people: Michael’s beloved daughter Beth is Aboriginal, and Allie’s childhood best friend was Alexander and Derek’s first victim Sarah. Thus, the novel suggests that while individual police officers can be just and moral, Australian law and policing have historically been racist in a way that enabled and continues to enable abuses of power against Aboriginal people.