Heritage and Land Theme Analysis

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 she moves to the small town of Boort with her mother, Ellie. The social and economic dominance of whites means that they have the power both to confiscate and to control land, and thus to suppress the ancient heritage of the Aboriginal people. Importantly, though, the novel ultimately suggests that while that Aboriginal heritage can be suppressed, it cannot be erased. Instead, its power lives on in the landscape and the wildlife that inhabits it.

The social and economic power of the town’s white residents is apparent in the way that they control both land and the cultural heritage that land contains. The Mortlocks, for instance, as the largest land-owning family in Boort, own the huge property of Invergarry. On this property sits the sacred stone circle, a site that is holy to the Aboriginal people who inhabit the area. Gerald Mortlock’s flooding of the stone circle in the 1930s to build a dam—in spite of Jimmy Raven’s warnings and protestations—illustrates the immense power that white Australians wield over the land and, therefore, over the Aboriginal heritage that sits on the land. Because they legally “own” the land, the white residents are free to do whatever they want with it—despite the fact that the very existence of these Aboriginal sites reveals that the land was not empty nor free for the taking when white settlers arrived.

The Mortlocks’ control over the land is not only manifest in 1933, the year to which Sadie travels to witness the terrible events around Jimmy Raven’s murder, but also in the present day of Sadie’s life. The Mortlocks, for instance, desecrate both the land and the heritage that it holds in several ways. After discovering that some Aboriginal sacred objects sit on his land, Craig Mortlock decides to sell them to make money, and seeks the counsel of David, an Aboriginal social worker who lives in Boort and who is Ellie’s boyfriend, to do so. As such, Craig Mortlock views these sacred objects purely in terms of their monetary value, rather than in terms of their cultural value, as Aboriginal characters such as David, Walter, and Auntie Lily do. Secondly, Craig Mortlock and his son desecrate Aboriginal heritage by treating its sacred spaces—such as the stone circle—with disrespect. This is apparent in the scene in which Sadie and Walter find Craig and his son Lachie, as well as others, lounging around the stone circle, drinking beers and littering. This is also apparent when, towards the end of the novel, Lachie Mortlock chases Sadie and Walter to the stone circle after he finds that they have broken into his house, and proceeds to try and knock down one of the stones. Not only are white settlers in control of the land, but they also actively seek to destroy the heritage it possesses.

Despite the immense control that white Australians such as Craig Mortlock and his family wield over the land, however, the novel affirms that the power of the Aboriginal heritage is so great that it cannot so easily be contained or mastered. Indeed, the power of Aboriginal heritage manifests in the terrain itself. The crows who populate the region and who speak to Sadie remind her that Boort and its surroundings are “Crow Country”—they belong to the ancient ancestral spirit of Waa the Crow, one of the important spirits for Aboriginals. These birds can be seen everywhere, and as such help keep the land’s heritage alive. Likewise, the land itself seems to resist the desecration of the Aboriginal heritage in the novel. Gerald Mortlock’s attempts to build a dam that floods the sacred stone circle ultimately fail, as the lake that forms above the stone circle eventually dries up. The landscape itself, in other words, seemingly works to protect the Aboriginal heritage it houses. There are also indications throughout the novel that the newer landscape of houses, roads, farms that the white settlers have built up has failed to erase the ancient landscape that lies beneath. It is this older landscape that the flying crow sees at the beginning of the novel, as he watches Sadie walk: “The lines of the creeks, and the bumps and sags of the hills and swamps held the stories of the country’s ancient history.” As such, the lines of the terrain point to an ancient story of creation that supersedes the more recent history of white settlement in Australia. At the end of the novel, Sadie has a dream in which she sees ancient campfires “lit by people of Crow and Eaglehawk”—Aboriginal people—flaming all over the land. Again, this indicates that the Aboriginal heritage—as exemplified in this vision of campfires lit by Australia’s first Aboriginal inhabitants—is still alive in the present, even if it is not always obvious or visible.

On the one hand, the white residents of Boort—such as the Mortlocks—exercise immense control of the land and the heritage it contains by virtue of their ownership of this land—ownership unfairly designated by the same colonialist government that pushed indigenous people out of their homes. However, the novel ultimately suggests that, in spite of the whites’ social and economic control over the land, the landscape and the wildlife themselves keep alive a memory of the past and of the people who inhabited Australia long before the arrival of Europeans.