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Chapter 1
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
Sadie, unsettled by the encounter with the speaking crow, hurries across the lakebed and down the path back to Boort. On the way, she passes paddocks and the abandoned railway station. Not in a rush to go home—she had a fight with her mother earlier—she lingers beneath the town’s World War I memorial, reading inscriptions. She sees her own and her mother’s last name: Hazzard. Sadie carries her mother’s last name because her parents never married, and her father left them. Her mother, Ellie, told Sadie that the Hazzards have lived in Boort since “forever,” and here Sadie finds proof.
The name “Hazzard” on the World War I monument indicates how far back the family’s roots reach in the town. The Hazzards have lived out their history in Boort. That Sadie’s mother never married and gave her own last name to her daughter also indicates that Sadie comes from an unusual family set-up—having been raised by a single mother, her upbringing is somewhat unconventional.
Themes
Sadie is disappointed by Boort, especially as it is not the paradise of trees and creeks that Ellie promised, but rather a lonely town of “parched yellow paddocks and empty roads.” Sadie and her mother have been here for a month already, and Sadie still doesn’t feel at home. Her mother found a nursing job at the local hospital.
Sadie’s disappointment in Boort suggests that she does not feel connected to the place where her family has roots. As such, she is alienated from the land that she should feel at home in. This suggests that her relationship to the land and heritage that Boort represents is more complicated than that of her mother, who spent her childhood and adolescence there and feels ‘at home’ in the landscape in a way that Sadie doesn’t.
Themes
The crow, perched in a tree, watches as Sadie continues walking the road along the lake and enters a house. The crow takes in the landscape, which is covered by the new marks of “roads, railway tracks, electricity towers, boundary fences.” These are the marks of settlers who cleared the land upon their arrival, building new things on top. But the crow can still discern “the old signs,” which are no longer obvious, although they are still there.
In looking down upon the scene, the crow discerns two layers to the landscape. One layer indicates the history of the white settlers who arrived in Australia relatively recently. But beneath their roads and railway tracks are “signs” that point to the existence of a much older history.
Themes
