Essay Questions

Explore how Kate Constable elucidates the theme of scandal and death in Crow Country using illustrations

Crow Country, as a novel, revolves around the theme of scandal and death. After Sadie moves back to her homeland, she is taken back to the 1930s in an attempt to develop further insight on a crime that had happened then, but all the evidence had been lost due to the flooding that had swiftly followed. She is therefore given the task of unravelling what had happened during the time, the murder of a man—Lachie Mortlock. When developers become interested in Lachie Mortlock’s land, they pressurize him to sell it. However, he refuses a situation that results in him being killed by the developers. After the killing, Sadie’s ancestor is presented to have hidden the body as brought out in the novel later when the same is unravelled to her. Sadie also discovers that her ancestor was responsible for the flooding that had happened in the valley sweeping away all available evidence on the murder that had happened at the time. In Crow Country, it can thus be argued that the novel-write centres her work on scandal and death that had happened in the 1930s.

Sadie is used as a bridge between the past and the present. Illustrate how this is true in Kate Constable’s Crow Country

After a heinous crime is committed against a man in the 1930s, all the evidence of the same is swept away by the floods that soon follow. In order to solve the mystery that lies behind the murder, someone has to travel back in time and learn from the crows of her ancestry as well as unravel the mystery of what happens. Sadie is just the right person for the job. After Sadie moves to her hometown later, she is time-traveled back to the time when the murder was committed in order to try and solve the same. Sadie becomes a bridge between the past and future then as she learns of what had transpired in those times. Sadie is able to learn, with the help of the crows, of what had happened then. She discovers how her ancestors being part of a development company plot to kill Lachie Mortlock and flood the valley after that to hide evidence of the same. Through the fact that she is able to travel back in time from the future to understand the murder with a new set of eyes, it can be argued that, indeed, Sadie is a bridge between the present and the past in Crow Country.

Violence is central to the novel, Crow Country. Show how this is explored in Crow Country.

The aspect of violence begetting violence is quite central to this work. For instance, the murder that Gerald Mortlock executes of Jimmy Raven in the year 1933 begins a series of violent events in the novel and climaxes with Mortlock’s own act of suicide. This is a suggestion that the violent act that he carried out on Raven boomerangs back to him such that he commits such violence against his own self. In this way, violence is brought out in this novel, and the aspect of this violence begetting violence particularly in the context of this work explained.