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Chapter 22
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
A week later, on the day of the footy match, when they know the Mortlocks as well as Ellie and David will be at the game, Sadie and Walter break into the Mortlocks’ house. Sadie grows terribly nervous as they move through the numerous vast rooms of the house. She has no idea how they will find what they are looking for. But then Walter calls her to the pool room. There, hanging on the walls, are old family photographs and family relics. In a large glass case, displaying stuffed wallabies and the bleached skull of a bird, they spot a pile of bones in the shadows. They are both shocked.
In breaking into the Mortlocks’ house, Sadie and Walter risk themselves—they are, technically, breaking the law, and it is for this reason that Sadie feels so nervous, even though she’s working toward justice more broadly. Their discovery of bones hidden in the shadows of a glass case raise many questions: who do these bones belong to? How did the family get a hold of them? And do they have a right to keep them? The bones suggest, indeed, that ‘skeletons in the closet’ lurk within the Mortlock family past.
Themes
Just then, Lachie Mortlock catches them in the room. He came back for his footy boots (soccer cleats), which he had forgotten. He calls them thieves and says he will call the police. Walter stands his ground, even though Sadie is terrified. Still, she asks him where the bones in the glass case came from, and he can’t answer. Walter and Sadie dash for the kitchen and run as fast as they can away from the house, as Lachie pursues them.
By threatening to call the police, Lachie frames Sadie and Walter as criminals, or as trespassers and burglars, and yet he seems unwilling to confront the legacy of seemingly violent crime that exists in his own family—crime suggested by the mysterious pile of bones that sits in his family’s glass case.
Themes
