Watching The Crows - Analysis

A poem that can’t stop hearing its own dismissiveness

The poem’s central claim is uncomfortable: the search party’s survival depends on Aboriginal knowledge, yet the speaker’s world keeps that knowledge fenced in by casual racism and a need to turn everything into a joke. Henry Lawson lets the story end with a kind of moral afterimage—a faint figure returning in night-vision—not to romanticize the tracker, but to show how the speaker’s mind is haunted by the moment he witnessed competence being treated as spectacle.

Rain, missing tracks, and who gets trusted

The opening sets up practical failure: the men have washed out tracks and left not a trace, so their usual methods are useless. In that gap, the poem quietly shifts authority. The searchers “swore at the rain,” but trusting the signs becomes the real tactic, and those signs belong to the blackfellow. The tracker doesn’t perform; he simply stood watching the crows. That stillness matters—he reads the landscape while the others thrash in it.

Yet the narration can’t keep from shrinking him with language: quiet old darkey, then solemn old blackman. Even when the speaker records respect (solemn, statue-like), the vocabulary keeps trying to put the man in a lower social place. The poem’s tension starts here: the tracker is indispensable, but the culture describing him refuses to grant him full dignity.

The joke that exposes the group’s moral weather

The middle stanza shows how the searchers manage discomfort—by joking. The speaker admits it: Most bushmen on solemn occasions will joke. The “super” (a figure of authority) speaks with a red nose cocked in the air, teasing: You think it old Harrison sit down up there? The line tries to make the tracker’s upward gaze seem foolish, as if looking to the sky must be superstition rather than expertise.

But Black Billy’s answer is flat and factual: I’m watching the crows. He explains the logic without ornament—Where the white man lies dead / The crows will fly over. The poem lets the tracker be the only person who speaks with clean purpose. In doing so, it makes the earlier joking look like a defense mechanism: the white men laugh partly because admitting the tracker’s skill would mean admitting their own dependence.

Life, death, and the poem’s quiet reversal

There’s a sharp, bitter inversion in the timeline. The lost man’s body is eventually found, but the poem tells us, bluntly, The blackfellow died. The tracker is not rewarded with narrative comfort; instead, time passes—long years have gone round—and the speaker is left with memory rather than closure. The line Where the white man lies dead also lands differently now: even in death, the white man remains the grammatical center of the tracker’s insight, as if Indigenous knowledge must be framed around white fate to be heard.

The night-vision: guilt shaped like a person

The final stanza turns from bush anecdote to haunting. The speaker says, still do I see, in my vision at night, a figure coming like a shadow. This isn’t a heroic statue anymore; it’s a returning presence that grows nearer until it becomes the form of that blackfellow watching the crows. The repetition of the phrase turns it into a refrain the mind can’t shake. What began as an observational detail—an old man scanning the sky—becomes a moral emblem: attention, patience, and knowledge that the speaker’s group treated too lightly.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the speaker is haunted, what exactly is doing the haunting: the tracker’s death, or the memory of how the white men spoke while needing him? The poem doesn’t show the searchers apologizing, only remembering. That final approach—nearer and nearer—suggests the past isn’t fading; it’s closing distance, insisting the speaker look again at the scene he once tried to laugh off.