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Chapter 8
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
When Sadie finally arrives home, Ellie reprimands her, demanding to know where she’s been and angry that Sadie is coated in mud. Ellie reminds her daughter that they’re going to a footy game soon. When Sadie goes to shower, it dawns on her that at the lake, she left her body for a few hours and “inhabited someone else’s.” She realizes that the crow sent her back to the past, into the “history of her own family.”
Sadie only begins to make sense of what happened to her after she returns home. Rightly so, she connects the crows with these changes—they are the ones who have sent her back to delve into, and experience, the history of her own family in 1933. The crows have set a chain of events in motion, which Sadie only half-understands at this point.
Themes
Sadie and her mother drive to a nearby town where the footy game is taking place. As Sadie leans against a fence, Lachie Mortlock comes up behind her. As always, she is nervous being around him. Lachie doesn’t want to hang around for the game, and he suggests they go somewhere else. Without intending to, Sadie suggests the lake.
Sadie’s nervousness around Lachie suggests how attracted she feels to him. Her desire to become close to him is indicated by the fact that they go to the lake—a location which has a special significance for her, given all that has taken place there.
Themes
Sadie climbs up behind Lachie on a trail bike, thrilled to be so close to him. They bump their way to the lake, and Sadie points out the place with the stone circle. Lachie is impressed by the stones—he’s never seen them before, and thinks they’re a burial site. Sadie tells him that he’s wrong, but doesn’t reveal what the crow has told her—that this is a “a secret place. A story place.”
That Sadie reveals the location of the stone circle to Lachie suggests an impulse on her part to trust him. She has not disclosed the specific location of this site to anyone else. Sadie’s attraction to Lachie is thus leading her to divulge her secrets. In doing so, however, Sadie seems to be privileging her own desires and impulses over the protection of the site—which, as the crow has told her, is a “secret” place of Aboriginal heritage. In this regard, she seems to compromise the heritage that the site embodies by thinking about herself first.
Themes
Suddenly, Sadie feels very nervous about having brought Lachie to the stone circle. She asks him to promise not to tell anyone about this place. He makes fun of her for wanting to keep the place a secret, but then draws close to her, and tells her that now it will be their special place. Sadie almost swoons at the close contact with Lachie. She doesn’t care that she can hear crows crying angrily. She is happy.
Sadie’s sudden uncertainty about revealing the site to Lachie indicates that she is mistrustful of her own judgment. The crows’ angry cries in the background suggest that they do not approve of Sadie’s decision to let Lachie into the secret, while Sadie’s decision to ignore this sign from the natural world foreshadows that there may be negative consequences following her decision.
Themes
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