59 pages • 1-hour read
The Things She's Seen
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Beth”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Town”
Beth Teller, one of the story’s two narrators, introduces herself and her father, Michael. Beth and Michael are in a remote Australian town to investigate a fire and a suspicious death. After dying in a recent car accident just before her 16th birthday, Beth is now a ghost, and so far, only Michael can see and hear her. Although Michael is white, Beth’s long-deceased mother was Aboriginal, and Beth identifies herself as Aboriginal. Her mother’s sisters, Aunty Viv and Aunty June, always told Beth that her mother was waiting for her “on another side” (5), and that someday Beth would see her mother again, but so far, Beth has not encountered her mother in the afterlife. Still, Beth has faith that they will be reunited at some point. She can wait patiently because she understands time from an Aboriginal perspective; her sense of moving forward is not dependent on the measurement of time but on making successful connections and relationships.
Beth wants her father, a police-investigator, to take an interest in the mystery of the fire because she is worried about his grief over her death. Michael has withdrawn from the rest of the family and is not taking care of himself. He is unwilling to even speak to Beth’s Aunty Viv, who was driving Beth to a party when another driver lost control and caused the accident that killed Beth.
Now, Michael stands on a small hill beside Beth and tries to hide his tears from her as he surveys the small town. He claims that he is trying to get a sense of the town and tells Beth that it reminds him of the town in which he and Beth’s mother grew up. Michael’s father was also a police officer, but unlike Michael, he was prejudiced against Aboriginal people and discriminated against them in his work. Michael, whose family is white, has been estranged from his parents since he began his relationship with Beth’s mother many years ago.
The fire that Michael is investigating took place at a home for troubled children. None of the children were hurt in the fire, but the home’s director and nurse are now missing. Michael is working on the assumption that the body found in the home after the fire is that of the nurse; Michael assumes that the man died in the fire. Beth believes that the director’s disappearance is intriguing, but Michael sees the case as nothing more than a tragic accident. She recognizes that he is mired in his grief and contrasts this with her Aunty Viv’s and other family members’ reactions to her death. Although they were sad, they have all managed to cherish the good things about Beth’s life and to celebrate their love for her. Michael, however, can only focus on Beth’s death.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Home”
Beth and Michael visit the site of the fire: a children’s home some distance from town that is now little more than a pile of rubble. Beth waves to a crow perched nearby, thinking that sometimes animals can actually see her. (The narrative will later reveal that the crow is really Sarah Blue, or “Crow”—a missing Aboriginal girl.) Beth’s father shows her a photo of the children’s home, and she notices that the children’s smiles look forced. Beth hopes that they are now in happier homes. The house was run by a foundation started by a wealthy local man named Alexander Sholt, whose family owned the house before he donated it. Michael identifies Sholt in the photograph and then points out the director, Tom Cavanagh, and the nurse, Martin Flint.
Michael reviews the facts he knows so far. The fire started at about 10 o’clock at night. When the alarm went off, the children escaped to safety. Beth mentions the children’s claim that the wind told them to run even before the alarm went off; Michael wonders if one of the children was breaking the rule about bedtime and saw the fire start. He speculates that the children might have claimed that the wind warned them rather than admitting to breaking a rule. When Beth wonders why Martin Flint did not escape as well, Michael admits that it is possible the man was unconscious or dead before the fire started, but he thinks that it is more likely that the man died in the fire. He guesses that Cavanagh might have become disoriented in the smoke and wandered the wrong way out into the deserted landscape beyond the school. Hearing this, Beth questions why the police did not find Cavanagh just as they found “that girl who was wandering around out here” (17). Michael points out that the girl was found wandering aimlessly by the river—and was not involved with the home or the fire in any way. The girl is not being treated seriously as a witness because she was high when the police found her. Beth and Michael begin bantering and laughing together, but when he suddenly remembers that Beth is dead, Michael’s laugh ends in a choking sound. Beth suggests that they interview the witness to the fire.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Witness”
When Beth and Michael enter the hospital, a flustered nurse points him toward the witness’s room. Just as Beth sees a thin, dark-haired girl in one of the rooms and tries to get her father’s attention, another girl farther down the hall calls to Michael, asking if he is a police officer investigating the fire. She is wearing a long green sweater over a hospital gown, and Beth notes that if this is the witness, she has clearly had time to sober up, for she is notably clear-eyed and focused. Beth trails Michael down the hall as he goes to meet the young woman, who introduces herself as Isobel Catching, asking Michael to call her “Catching.” When he comments on her unusual last name, she explains that her Aboriginal great-great-grandmother was given this name by the “white boss” (23) because she was good at catching cattle.
When Michael asks Catching whether she saw anything on the night of the fire, she warns him that he might find her story hard to believe. She mentions “monsters” and “other-places” (23), and Beth thinks that Catching might be playing some kind of joke, but Michael is ready to listen. Catching focuses inward on something that deeply frightens her, and this surprises Beth, because she initially believed Catching to be completely fearless. Catching warns Michael that the story will take too long to tell because it begins long before the fire. Finally, Catching begins her story, saying that it all began with a sunset.
Part 1 Analysis
Beth’s first words are “My dad looked like crap” (3), and the blunt yet casual tone of this statement establishes Beth’s honest narrative voice and foreshadows the following revelation that Beth is a ghost who is trying to help her father to cope with the grief he feels over her loss. Additionally, the fact that Beth is more focused on helping her father than on telling the story of the murder emphasizes the novel’s overarching emphasis upon The Role of the Community in Healing Grief. Additionally, when Beth reveals that she is dead, her tone holds a mixture of acceptance and disappointment, for she is puzzled by her experience of death and did not expect to be trapped between worlds. These early passages offer several moments of backshadowing, because Beth’s intuition that she will eventually see her mother again is later explained by the revelation that Beth herself has actively chosen her current state of limbo in order to stay and help her father. There is also foreshadowing in this section: Her sense of being displaced hints that she will eventually find a way to move on.
The characterization of Beth’s father, Michael Teller, a white man, reveals him to be a deeply conflicted and nuanced character. Although the novel primarily focuses on Michael’s grief, he is also revealed to be an upright and moral person, for he holds nothing but his disdain for police officers who use their power to oppress Aboriginal people, and his own decision to defy his parents’ prejudices and pursue a relationship with Beth’s Aboriginal mother reveals that he has a hard core of integrity. This old familial conflict introduces the novel’s thematic examination of The Impact of Colonialism in Australia.
The two other Aboriginal girls whose fates are intertwined with Beth’s are introduced in Chapters 2 and 3. Most importantly, Beth’s interaction with the crow in Chapter 2 stands as Beth’s first unknowing interaction with the character later introduced in Catching’s story as Crow; however, this person is really a missing Aboriginal girl named Sarah Blue. When Beth first sees the unusually large crow sitting in a tree, she wonders whether the bird can see her because it looks at her with its head tilted, “Almost as if it was asking [her] a question” (12). Beth’s impression will later turn out to be accurate, even though Beth thinks she is being fanciful at the time, for the narrative will eventually reveal that the bird is actually Sarah Blue in her crow-form. When Isobel Catching is introduced in Chapter 3, this completes the set of the three Aboriginal girls whose names make up the Australian title of the book: Catching Teller Crow. This original title emphasizes the three characters’ equal importance to the story’s outcome, for the central conflict of the novel focuses on whether Beth, Catching, and Sarah will be able to find hope and move past the traumas that they have experienced.
Beth’s description of meeting Catching also contains several elements of foreshadowing and adds further emphasis on the authors’ use of color-based symbolism. While Beth identifies herself with the color yellow in Chapter 1 and Sarah will be identified with the color blue through her last name, Catching is associated with the color green, in the form of her oversized sweater. The initial encounter with Catching also introduces significant discrepancies between the police’s reports and the reality of the girl’s appearance. Specifically, Beth notes that Catching is clear-eyed and sharp, which does not match descriptions that Catching, the “witness,” was taken to the hospital to sober up after she was found wandering by a river and apparently under the influence of drugs. This discrepancy foreshadows Beth’s and Michael’s eventual realization near the end of the book that Catching is not, in fact, the witness to the fire.
The structure of the novel’s opening also conveys a key element of Aboriginal philosophy, for just as Chapter 1, “The Town,” establishes the wider community setting, Chapter 2, “The Home,” focuses on domestic considerations, and only in Chapter 3, “The Witness,” do the authors finally turn their attention to one specific individual. By ordering the chapters in this way, the authors reinforce the idea that individuals can only exist within the broader contexts of family and community. This deliberate order of emphasis—town, home, and individual person—reflects the novel’s emphasis on The Role of the Community in Healing Grief. As the story unfolds, it will soon become clear that Beth, Catching, and the yet-to-be-introduced Sarah all need one another in order to finally move on with their own paths.
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