Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Crow Country, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Prejudice and Discrimination
Heritage and Land
Justice and Restitution
Violence and Integrity
Summary
Analysis
Clarry calls to Sarah Louise. It is 1933, and she is standing in the shop with Gerald Mortlock and her father, shortly after Jimmy’s murder. Gerald is telling Clarry that he knew he could count on him. Clarry asks if they are “square,” and Gerald says yes. After Gerald leaves, Sarah Louise looks at her father and realizes that she will never be able to look at him in the same way again.
Sarah Louise’s disappointment in Clarry reflects her recognition that her father has behaved without integrity, in an immoral way, by choosing to help Gerald Mortlock cover up the murder of Jimmy rather than exposing it and seeking justice for Jimmy. In doing so, her father has put his own self-interest above integrity and has perpetuated a cycle of violence against Aboriginal people.
Themes
Clarry goes to bed, and Sarah Louise throws Gerald Mortlock’s bloodied clothes into the fire. As she empties the pockets of her father’s trousers, which he has given her to wash, she draws out a small bundle wrapped in what seems like possum fur. She realizes it is the bundle that Jimmy Raven entrusted to her father as he was dying. Sarah Louise is torn about what to do—to keep the bundle or to burn it. She can hear crows crying.
In discovering the special things that Jimmy had left to her father right before his death, Sadie, in the body of Sarah Louise, is confronted with a choice: she must decide how best to act. Her urge to burn the things suggests that, in spite of her moral impulses, she is fearful and is therefore tempted to take the easier path, by simply destroying Jimmy’s things. This temptation shows how easy it is for a person to get caught up in societal patterns of violence and injustice, even when they genuinely wish to behave with integrity.
Themes
Suddenly, Sadie, in the body of Sarah Louise, realizes that she is herself, Sadie from the future, daughter of Ellie Hazzard. Although Sadie was always somewhat aware of this while inhabiting the past, this knowledge seems to rise concretely to her conscious mind at this moment. She puts Jimmy’s bundle in a tin can and goes out into the darkness. At the foot of a tree, she buries the tin with Jimmy’s things, marking the tree trunk with an “S”: “S for Sadie, S for secret, for stones, sacred stone, S for sorry.” She begins to feel delirious and tired, and wants to rest, but she knows that she cannot stay out in the darkness. She falls and decides to rest for a while, as the darkness closes over her.
Sadie’s explicit awareness that she is Sadie from the future—and not Sarah Louise “Sadie” of the past—frees her up to exercise more agency. While Sadie had always been aware on some level that she was still herself when traveling to the past to inhabit Sarah Louise’s body, here this knowledge becomes more concrete. As Sarah Louise, Sadie chooses to act with courage and integrity, rather than out of self-interest or cowardice. This change suggests that understanding how unjust acts reverberate through time is a key component of learning to behave morally.
Themes
