Crow Country is a 2011 children's fantasy-mystery novel by Australian author Kate Constable. It won the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Young Readers and the Patricia Wrightson Award for Children's Literature at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
Crow Country takes place in the non-fictional town of Boort in Victoria, Australia, where Constable currently lives. It draws inspiration from Aboriginal Australian mythology, specifically the stories of the Yung Balung Clan of the Dja Dja Wurrung people: "Waa the Crow, is one of their commanding totems, a hero and ancestor of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. Their land has been taken over by white people and their population decimated but for a remaining few."
In both Crow Country and Constable's earlier, better-known Chanters of Tremaris trilogy, Constable deals with issues of diversity and integration. As stated on her Scholastic author page, while working on the trilogy, she "was appalled at the savage demolition of that ideal that unfolded around me every day, the demands that all Australians adhere to one (Anglo-Celtic) heritage, one (conservative) way of looking at the world, one (frightened and unfriendly) response to strangers who approach us seeking shelter. Here was the consequence of the 'one voice' philosophy, even clearer and more terrifying than I'd ever imagined it."
These considerations appear in Crow Country as well: the plot involves a young white girl traveling back in time to 1933, when the lands of the aforementioned clan are first being taken over. The present-day parts of the story also touch on present-day racism against Aboriginal Australians through the lens of the protagonist's mother's relationship with an Aboriginal man. While the novel is considered well-researched and is even prefaced by praise from an elder of the Yung Balung Clan, it has still received criticism for buying into the "White Savior" cliche, as well as other, lesser-known racist stereotypes such as the "Magical Negro".
Crow Country integrates several fantastical aspects common to Constable's other works of children's fantasy, such as magical rituals and individuals with magic powers. Constable has written of the appeal of writing fantasy as related to the "sense of plunging into a delicious pool of freedom, a wild liberation that realistic fiction couldn't offer," and her philosophy that "any worthwhile fiction addresses, on some level, moral and philosophical questions."
