Crow Country Themes

In Kate Constable’s time travel fantasy Crow Country, Sadie, a young Australian girl, learns about Aboriginal history from the dark-feathered crows that begin speaking to her when she and her mother, Ellie, move to Boort—a small town in rural Australia that hides secrets about the dark past of Aboriginals and white Australians in the district. On various occasions shortly after arriving in Boort, Sadie is mysteriously whisked to a past time…

Crow Country is fundamentally a novel about the conflict between two cultures over heritage and land. On one side is the ancient culture of the Aboriginal people, who inhabited Australia for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. On the other side is the culture of the white settlers who, after arriving in Australia, subjugated and displaced many of the continent’s original inhabitants. It is this conflict Sadie is drawn into when…

Crow Country tells the tale of Sadie Hazzard, a thirteen-year-old girl who gets pulled into a decades-old murder mystery shortly after she and her mother, Ellie, move to the town of Boort in rural Australia. The dark history involving three families in the town—including Sadie’s own—threatens to repeat itself in the present, when tensions once again erupt between the families. As the conflict unfolds, the novel ultimately suggests that violence begets violence, and…