"My grandpa on Dad’s side – who I’d never actually met – had been a cop for thirty years, and he wasn’t a good guy. Dad said his old man thought the law was there to protect some people and punish others. And Aboriginal people were the ‘others’. Grandpa and Grandma Teller had thrown Dad out when he started seeing Mum, and they’d never wanted anything to do with me, their Aboriginal granddaughter."
Beth Teller is a ghost. Literally. She is a dead girl acting as one of the book's two narrative voices. This passage focuses on the central element at play in the narrative. It is a tale of systemic prejudice and how this irrational discrimination leads to generational trauma. Were the story set in America, Beth would be a member of an indigenous Native American tribe. The equivalent of this in Australia is the indigenous Aboriginal natives who were equally targeted by European settlers for racially-fueled oppression. The reference to the Aboriginal people as "others" is not just a literary trope but a longstanding element of psychological and sociological theory. The "other" represents any group that diverges from what is considered the norm. Even more to the point is that identification of a group as "the other" implies a threat to normalcy which, in the extreme case, confers the authority to allow it to be rejected, replaced, or annihilated in the name of preserving the natural order. In this case, Grandpa and Grandma Teller merely choose the option of rejection. That Beth is the ghost of a young woman implies that someone else viewing her as a representative of the threatening "other" opted for the most extreme reaction of annihilation.
"The storm swallows everything.
We can’t see.
The highway. Where is it?
A wall of water smashes into the car.
The river!
My head slams against the window.
My eyes close.
Time passes.
My eyes open.
Someone’s shouting. Mum."
The other narrative voice in the story is that of Isobel Catching. Her narrative is differentiated structurally from Beth's by virtue of being presented as verse. Although appearing as such, Catching's sections are not technically poems. Her story is divided into chapters and the chapters all appear in this form, but they tell a story like Beth's. The primary difference is that Catching's narrative is more abstract than Beth's, but it is a narrative just the same. For instance, this passage is the first section of the book featuring Catching's first-person narration and it tells the story of being in a car accident with her mother. This story could just as easily have been conveyed through prose as it is a self-contained and clearly delineated series of events that tell the story of this car accident. The choice to have Catching tell her story in this way serves not only to differentiate her storytelling from Beth's, but also to highlight how Catching is a character more firmly in touch with her Aboriginal heritage of oral storytelling than Beth, who is only half-Aboriginal.
"The law that let the government take Aboriginal children lasted for generations. They came for your Grandma when she was a kid, just as they’d come for her mum before her. But your Grandma didn’t get away.
They put her in a bad place."
Catching's narration provides essential background information relative to the primary story. The context of the present-day criminal investigation being conducted by Beth's father ultimately is connected to the oppressive history of racial discrimination against Australia's indigenous people. In this passage, Catching is recalling a story told by her mother about systemic child abuse of Aboriginal children. These kids were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to live at a "children's home." The reference to this institution as a "bad place" belies the benevolence of its official description. This systemic violation of essential rights is a blight upon the history of Australia that reflects and mirrors that which occurred in every country where European colonization took place. The children's home also factors substantially in the present-day criminal investigation in which it has been burned down. The story that Catching's mum relates to her daughter becomes an illustration of the dehumanizing history of Aboriginal people which is replicated in the present-day narrative being told through the perspectives of both narrators.
