Introduction
Ecopoetry is often praised for its capacity to critique and re-envision humanity’s place in the greater non-human biosphere. However, increasing research at the intersection of postcolonial and ecocritical studies has argued that the genre’s planetary framework risks perpetuating neo-colonial or ‘euro-centric’ ways of thinking and writing about the more-than-human, especially when it fails to take ‘non-Western concerns’ into account (Banerjee 196–197). As Katharina Fackler notes, the ‘ecological imagination’ has ‘too often been shaped by settler colonial paradigms’ (242). This issue is particularly apparent in colonial contexts such as Australia, where contemporary settler ecopoets remain not only complicit in the overarching logic of the settler-colonial project but also deeply entangled in the environmental misunderstandings of their settler poetry forebears.
These misunderstandings are evinced by the nationalistic poetic ambitions of the Bulletin or bush ballad poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, or the Jindyworobak poets of the early-mid twentieth century. Often centring on rural environments in their works, these movements not only sought to establish a settler-Australian mythos predicated on geographical and environmental tropes but did so by either erasing First Nations peoples and their sovereign connection to their respective Countries or by grossly misappropriating their cultures and histories. This misappropriation of First Nations lands played a critical role in laying the foundation for the ‘settler problem’ of Australian ecopoetics: the ethically vexed venture of ecopoeticising First Nations Countries still living under the racist, anthropocentric and extractive logics of the colonial-capitalist project. My reading of the settler problem as one indelibly shaped by a settler poetic history of repackaging First Nations lands into a product of settler culture is informed by Wiradjuri poet and scholar Jeanine Leane’s understanding of the ‘settler mythscape’, which she describes as the ‘stories settlers invented and imported to establish the founding myth of nation’ (sec. 1).
In this essay, I seek to trace how this ‘settler problem’ has become a key preoccupation in settler-Australian ecopoetry and ecocriticism. I begin by first defining ecopoetics in an Australian context, thinking about how it differs from ecopoetic developments elsewhere in the Anglosphere. Drawing on First Nations theorists including Puralia Meenamatta, Jeanine Leane, Evelyn Araluen and Ambellin Kwaymullina, as well as ecocritical and postcolonial theorists Jonathan Skinner, Caitlin Maling, Phillip Hall, Martin Harrison, Kate Fagan and Cassandra O’Loughlin, I analyse works by three key settler ecopoets – Judith Wright’s ‘At Cedar Creek’ (1976), Jennifer Rankin’s ‘Dragon Veins’ (1978) and John Kinsella’s ‘Tawny Frogmouth Moon Negative Poem’ (2018). By first interrogating Wright and Rankin’s respective approaches to writing the non-human – what Phillip Hall has called ‘ecological postcolonialism’ in Wright (1), and what I call (via Donna Haraway) ‘sympoiesis’ in Rankin (Haraway 58) – I propose that it is within the self-reflexive, procedural nature of their respective works that we can discern the emergence of an ‘anti-mythic’ way to write and encounter both First Nations Country and the non-human. I then turn to Kinsella’s decades-long approach to developing ‘anti, post, counter, and radical’ pastoral approaches to writing ecologies in Australia (‘The Pastoral’ 37). Through a reading of Kinsella’s work, I posit that Kinsella’s poetry further crystallises the procedural ecopoetic project foregrounded in the work of Wright and Rankin, developing a poetics that experiments with representing not only a sense of non-human agency but his own settler agency as well.
A central way these poets have negotiated the ‘settler problem’ of ecopoetics is through a procedural approach in which the act of negotiation stands as one of the defining principles, resulting in a less mythological approach to environmental representation. This essay also provides an alternative, demythologising framework for thinking about ecopoetics in colonial contexts, which does not seek to coopt or reduce the act of decolonisation to that of a metaphor (to borrow the title of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s acclaimed 2012 essay, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’). In concluding, I turn to Lisa Slater’s work on the ‘politics of uncertainty’ to read Wright, Rankin and Kinsella as poets who were (in varying degrees) engaged in an (eco)poetics of uncertainty.
Ecopoetics in Australia
Ecopoetry first gained wider prominence in the early 2000s when the global environmental crisis, propelled by climate change and ideas such as the ‘Anthropocene’, began entering into popular discourse around the world.[1] As US ecopoet and critic Jonathan Skinner stated in the introduction to the first issue of his ecopoetics journal in 2001, ecopoetry recognises ‘that human impact on the earth and its other species, is without a doubt the historical watershed of our generation, a generation born in the second half of the twentieth century’ (‘Introduction’ 7). However, ecopoetics does not only denote a thematic approach to addressing the environmental crisis. As Skinner further relates, ecopoetry can be thought of ‘as an edge … where different disciplines can meet and complicate one another’ (‘Introduction’ 6). This latter definition neatly links to the etymology of the term itself, which fuses the prefix ‘eco’ (from the Greek oikos), meaning literally house or home, with ‘poetics’, the art of writing poetry. This etymology provides a definition in which – through experimenting with the act of writing – poets can not only heighten a reader’s awareness of the interdependent nature of human and non-human relations but also affect new ways of thinking about that interdependency by formally investigating, to quote US ecopoet, Forrest Gander, ‘the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception’ (216). Gander highlights the danger of allowing the prefix ‘eco’ to overshadow ‘poetics’, and thus reinvigorates the way ecopoetry requires a poet to come to terms with not only a more planetary, less-anthropocentric way of being in the world but also a way of writing it.
Despite contestation over the definition of the term, ecopoetry has been largely discussed in an American context, often overlooking its development in other parts of the world.[2] As Bonny Cassidy points out in her review of one of the first comprehensive ecopoetry anthologies, The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013), it ‘is strictly American. Its editors, poets Laura-Gray Street and Ann Fisher-Wirth, reconstruct a story that ecopoetry was born American, and that its present and future quite possibly reside there’ (‘Ecopoetry’). Adding further weight to Cassidy’s critique, this ‘Born in the USA’ vision of ecopoetics has often been defined by a decontextualised notion of ecology, one that fails to acknowledge or engage with how this poetic mode plays out in contested and colonised spaces. This is an erasure I seek to address here by highlighting that one of the consistent thematic throughlines in settler-Australian ecopoetics can be seen in its persistent awareness of ecopoetry’s entanglement in the colonial project.
This essay adopts Skinner’s reading of ecopoetry as a ‘form of site-specificity’, a way of shifting the ‘focus from themes to topoi [place], tropes and entropologies to … an array of practices converging on the oikos, the planet earth that is the only home our species currently knows’ (‘Conceptualizing’).[3] Recentring ecopoetry around the ‘oikos’ here provides a way of situating settler-Australian ecopoetics as a contemporary expression of that greater settler tradition of poetically reckoning with themes of belonging, identity and land through environmental tropes. Poet and critic Martin Harrison notes that this reckoning has been a consistent theme in Australian settler poetics since ‘colonial times’ (54). Here we can think to the Romantic lyricism of nineteenth-century poets, such as Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall; the horse-galloping heroics of the bush balladeers, including A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and Will Ogilvie; or the Romantic-cum-Pastoral verse of the Jindyworobak Movement, which included poets such as Rex Ingamells, Nancy Cato and Ian Mudie. Harrison identifies A. D. Hope’s ‘Australia’ as epitomising certain ‘mythemes’ of settler culture (27) by presenting an Australia that is ‘curiously placeless’ (26) and erased of First Nations presence: ‘She is the last of lands, the emptiest’, ‘Without songs, architecture, history’ (190). Here I expand on Harrison’s reading to understand how such ‘mythemes’ have become a central problem or preoccupation in contemporary settler ecopoetics.
In contrast to Hope’s ideological approach to over-see Australia, Harrison further turns to certain poets who challenge homogenising visions of ‘Australia’ by addressing ‘the issue of place’ through the imaginative and linguistic convergence of the ‘mind, eye, ear and body’ with ideas of ‘Country’ (107). For Harrison, the use of ‘Country’ is a deliberate provocation. He argues that this word can unsettle the ‘neat overlaps of meaning’ evoked by colonial terms such as ‘land’, ‘property’, ‘farm’, ‘home’, ‘district’ and ‘landscape’ (101). By centring his poetic discussion around ‘Country’, he goes on to assert that the most successful modern Australian poems are ones that centre on encountering ecologies as opposed to merely recounting them. This argument is perhaps no better captured than in his chapter, ‘self, place, newness’, where he analyses the poetry of Jennifer Rankin, Robert Gray, Peter Porter, Antigone Kefala and Phillip Hodgins.
Although Harrison uses the term ‘Country’ to emphasise the unique nature of a sense of place in settler Australia (and settler writing), he nevertheless misappropriates the established First Nations term for his own settler theoretical prerogatives. Indeed, it should be noted that despite anchoring his discussion to this term, he fails to provide a clear definition of what Country means for First Nations peoples, nor provide a definition from a First Nations person.[4] With this in mind, I share here a First Nations perspective on Country from Palyku novelist Ambelin Kwaymullina:
for Aboriginal peoples, country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human – all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. (12)
Kwaymullina’s description highlights not only the significance the term holds for First Nations peoples, but that for a settler to truly come to terms with it would require them to engage extensively with a First Nations community who belongs to the particular Country the poet is seeking to write about. For me, this raises the question of whether poetry, even one that is sensory, relational and alive to language’s ability to express an ecological permutation of self and land, can truly provide a poet with a way, as Harrison asserts, of allowing Country to enter ‘into unconscious and intuitive areas of the mind’ (107). In bringing Kwaymullina into dialogue with Harrison’s analysis, I also seek to explicate that when dealing with First Nations knowledge as settlers we need to bring First Nations knowledges to the fore and ensure that the use of such terminology does not err on the side of a neo-colonial cooption. In his keynote lecture at Association for the Study of Australian Literature 2022, plangermairreenner poet Puralia Meenamatta (Jim Everett) provides a way of thinking about inclusive and collaborative approaches to Country: ‘we all belong to Country, we all come from Country’ (63:00), and ‘Country is the way we can heal’ (52:00). Everett here opens a space where both First Nations peoples and settler people can connect to Country from their own respective positions; the question remains of what role poetry should play (if any) in this dialogue.
A postcolonial approach to reading contemporary poetry such as is evident in Harrison’s work, which understands place as going beyond simply romanticising or idealising the environment, has been a key subject for contemporary ecocritics. For example, Phillip Hall puts forward the term ‘ecological postcolonialism’ (1). Analysing the works of three settler poets, Judith Wright, John Kinsella and Laurie Duggan, he argues that these writers can be thought of as ‘models for what a postcolonial ecocritical poetics of place’ might look like (1). For Hall, in the context of Australia, where ‘all the continent’s ecosystems are in some senses “human-made”’, a poetry of ecological postcolonialism is concerned
with the intimate relationship between the human and the non-human, between the social and the ecological. It also reminds us that nature is an expression of our political, literary and scientific understanding and that we experience it not merely to rhapsodise but to see with a scientific eye sensitive to the custodianship and knowledge of First Nations. (1)
Hall’s definition of ‘ecological postcolonialism’ highlights the need for ecopoets to acknowledge and/or address their complicity in the ecocidal and genocidal narrative of colonisation if they are to provide an evocation of ‘place’ that meaningfully acknowledges First Nations sovereignty. This attunement to a poem’s sociohistorical context is also essential for avoiding the mythologising trap laid out by settler Australia’s poetic forebears. Arguably, Hall’s discussion presents an approach to ecopoetics that is more attuned to the ethical representation of place than Harrison’s model, while remaining similarly grounded in an experiential poetic practice.
Poet and critic Judith Wright is arguably one of the earliest settler-Australian poets who sought to reflect on not only human and non-human relations but also the relation between the social and ecological in her writing. As Hall notes, Wright ‘thought about what it might mean to write a nature poetry that is informed by the biological sciences and by a sense of postcolonial environmentalism’ (1). Despite the ample critical attention Wright has received from ecocritics, I would like to now revisit one of her poems, ‘At Cedar Creek’ (1976), as well as a poem by Jennifer Rankin, ‘Dragon Veins’ (1978), and one by John Kinsella, ‘Tawny Frogmouth Moon Negative Poem’ (2018). Through these analyses, I seek to highlight how these works can be seen as significant examples of poets who have wrangled with the ‘settler problem’ through a self-reflexive, procedural ecopoetics that we might think of as an anti-mythic approach to writing place.
The Procedural ‘Eco-Poetics’ of Judith Wright, Jennifer Rankin and John Kinsella
With the rise of radical counterculture movements in the 1960s and 1970s,[5] ecological rights and Indigenous rights began to take centre stage in political debates around the world. This centrality is perhaps no better discerned in Australian settler poetics than in the life and writing of Judith Wright, who was not only a poet but also an environmentalist and Aboriginal land rights campaigner. Alongside publishing twelve poetry collections between 1942 and 1985, she helped form the ‘Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland’, as well as the ‘Aboriginal Treaty Committee’ (‘Who was Judith Wright?’). Between 1965 and 1975, she also led a popular revolt against the Queensland Government’s attempts to open 80 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef to mining for oil, gas, fertiliser and cement – a battle that led to the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in 1976 and which is detailed in her work The Coral Battleground (1977).
Notably, Wright was also close friends with the Quandamooka poet and activist Aunty Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker). Their friendship had a profound influence on Wright’s attempt to move settler poetry out of its secular self-mythologising edifice and into a localised dialogue with environments that acknowledged First Nations sovereignty. As Peter Minter notes, this friendship produced a uniquely ‘feminist mode of decolonised transcultural environmentalism, the appearance and intensity of which had a significant influence on the emergence of a late-modern, or even post-modern, counter-cultural environmentalist sensibility from the mid-1960s onwards in Australia’ (‘Kath Walker’ 63).
In line with these relationships and commitments, Wright moved ‘nature poetry’ beyond Romanticism (as per Harpur and Kendell), nation building (as per the balladeers), or environmental nationalism and cultural appropriations (as in the Jindyworobaks), and into the realm of a radically progressive mission to politically and poetically dislodge settler conceptions of the environment from her described idea of the ‘Australian Myth’: the ‘whole legislative and economic system’ that settlers created in Australia, based on the anthropocentric idea, underpinned by Terra Nullius, that they inhabited a ‘virtually unlimited country’ (‘Conservation’ 57). This is expressed, for example, in Wright’s poem ‘At Cedar Creek’, published in one of her later collections, Fourth Quarter (1976). In this poem, the poet recontextualises her experience sitting beside a waterway near Tamborine Mountain, Queensland (where she lived between 1948 and 1975) within a reflection on environmental degradation on a global scale. The poem begins with Wright struggling to find the ‘formula for poetry’ after reading ‘morning headlines’ and ruminating on her work to be done as an activist (204):
Banking and Industry
welcome the big sell-out.
Report Urges New Approach:
Food or Famine?
Design for New Cities Condemned.
My desk is silted with papers:
Write to the Minister
Protest torture of political prisoners.
Save the Forests.
Protest the Pollution of Estuaries.
(204–205)
This list of headlines and ‘things to do’ is later followed by a memory of observing environmental pollution in Japan:
… in Kyoto
I saw the sweet Kamo
choked with old plastic toys,
tyres and multiple rubbish.
(205)
Despite the length of the poem (eight stanzas, seventy-two lines), it is not until the final six lines that Wright directly turns to the creek alluded to in her title, as well as her search for that poetic ‘formula’:
By the waterfalls of Cedar Creek
where there aren’t any cedars
I try to remember the formula for poetry.
Plastic bags, broken beer-bottles
effluent from the pig-farm
blur an old radiance.
By first drawing attention to the fact she sits at ‘Cedar Creek’, a place named after trees that no longer exist in that very place,[6] Wright ironically acknowledges the impact of colonisation on the area she finds herself in. This self-positioning also highlights the way colonisation sought not only to erase First Nations history (i.e., through the naming of the creek as ‘Cedar Creek’), but also settler history (through the fact that there are no more cedars). For me, this poem presents an anti-romanticisation of the environment. The detritus of settlers, the ‘plastic bags’ and ‘broken beer-bottles’, as well as the ‘effluent from the pig-farm’, lead the poem into a self-reflexive space that acknowledges the impact of pollution not only on the environment Wright finds herself in, but on her conscience and poetry. In this, the poem does more than thematically highlight the way humans have negatively affected the non-human world: it allows the reader to witness how that detrimental relationship in turn is negatively affecting Wright’s own writing process. This is, in essence, an attempt to contextualise and demythologise Wright’s own settler conception of ecology: a way, to return to Hall’s idea of ‘ecological postcolonialism’, to think about the intimate relationship not only between the ‘human and non-human’, but between the ‘social and the ecological’ (1).
The above poem provides a way of reading Wright as one of the earliest examples of a settler poet who went beyond simply creating a settler ‘move to innocence’ through poetry – one that problematically attempts ‘to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity’ – and instead speaks of ‘what is irreconcilable within settler colonial relations’ (Tuck and Yang 3, 4). In other words, the poet lays bare an uncomfortable truth not in an attempt to escape its grasp, but to allow the act of grasping to demonstrate how she, as a settler, is a part of that uncomfortable truth. On a formal level, the poem – as a rather conversational oscillation between headlines, a list of ‘things to do’, and reflections on environmental devastation – also provides an example of a more process-based ecopoetics. This is a poetics less interested in building a Romantic poetic facade to frame the environment and more interested in breaking down poetic facades to reframe how she (and other settlers) perceive and relate to the environment.
Despite the poem’s formal experimentation and overt ecological concerns, from another perspective, we might read Wright’s poem as one that remains mired in the Romantic-pastoral mode of her settler forebears and is thereby intrinsically linked to what Harrison termed their ‘mythemes’ (27). Ecopoet and scholar Kate Fagan has also touched on this aspect of the ‘foundational eco-poetics of Judith Wright’ (‘In a Sense’). She argues that Wright’s ‘pastoral mode of observing natural and non-metropolitan habitats’ was ‘still mediated by frames of romanticism, albeit reworked in a specific local environment’ (‘In a Sense’). This can be seen in the above poem, with Wright still searching out some Romantic notion of the environment, where its ‘radiance’ is not blurred by pollution. However, Wright’s admission in ‘Cedar Creek’ that this radiance no longer exists signals perhaps that in her later poetry, she began to come to terms with the incompatibility of the Romantic-pastoral mode and the colonial environments she spent so much of her life protecting. This is a reading supported by other Wright scholars, such as Terry Gifford, who finds in Wright’s poetry a ‘post-pastoral’ turn that broke with idyllic representations of settler landscapes and instead ‘problematised’ her ‘engagement with land’, highlighting what it means to ‘be a part of nature and yet uneasy with relationships of ownership and exploitation’ (paragraph 5, 8).[7]
This post-pastoral interpretation also speaks to Fagan’s adoption of the prefix and hyphen in the term ‘eco-poetics’ to describe Wright’s work. For Fagan, this hyphen provides a way to signal both ‘continuity and break’ between
a political engagement with the deeper, violent terms of European aesthetic categories that arrived in Australia with colonisation, and a corollary acknowledgement of how those categories are repurposed, hybridised and even feralised in post-settlement Australian poetry. (‘In a Sense’)
To further knead out Fagan’s idea of a transitional ‘eco-poetic’ between ‘European aesthetic categories’ and the ‘feralised’ products of settler poetry, I would now like to turn to a poet who we might think of as continuing Wright’s ‘eco-poetic’ aims, albeit in a very different way: Jennifer Rankin. As Bonny Cassidy argues, Rankin, alongside other poets in the 1960s and 1970s such as Robert Adamson and Robert Gray, began seeking ‘fresh ways to visit representations of place without revisiting established conventions of landscape poetry, colonial, or otherwise’ (‘Pre-thought’ 511). To provide one example of Rankin’s poetry, I turn here to a poem titled ‘Dragon Veins’, published in her collection, Earth Hold (1978):
Four birds fall over the sea.
Blue sky is lidding my after-day.
On a new-made southern beach I search for a line through hillside. Sand.
Flat reef.
Trees gnarl down to sea-pull tree-roots wrangle in wet coarse sand.
Gulls are whitening my daughter’s eyes.
The line slips.
My iris sun bleeds as its edge.
Then over the sea. A thin shadow. I find cloud
pick up the line
follow it into this poem.
(34)
Fluctuating between seemingly objective images, ‘Four birds fall over the sea’, and her search ‘through hillside. Sand. Flat reef’ to find lines for the poem, Rankin grapples (much like Wright) with the question of how to represent the environment she finds herself in. To do this though, the poem emphasises neither the environment, the impacts of colonisation, nor even the poet, but ‘the line’, the literal process through which both the environment and poet find themselves emerging into text. For me, this approach recalls ecological philosopher Donna Haraway’s idea of ‘sympoiesis’, what she defines as a ‘making-with’, for
Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. (58)
Haraway’s definition of sympoiesis provides a useful complement to Martin Harrison’s own reading of Jennifer Rankin’s poetry as one that addresses ‘the issue of place’ through the imaginative and linguistic convergence of the ‘mind, eye, ear and body’ with ideas of ‘Country’ (107). Rankin’s ability to achieve this in the above poem also stems from the procedural nature of the work, which can be readily discerned in its formal qualities. This is evident in the way it consciously seeks to both capture and describe how experience can slip into a poem and create a line. This results in a liminal aesthetic, a sense of linguistic play that blurs clear distinctions between the perceiver and the perceived, between a sense of human and non-human agency.
Here, it is also useful to step back to Wright who, in her discussion of Australian poet John Blight, argues that many of his poems are neither about ‘nature’ nor ‘man’, but the ‘primal puzzle, the relationship of the two – of thought to world, of man to earth’ (Preoccupations 213).[8] This ‘primal puzzle’ or ‘relationship’ is again highlighted in the last three lines of Rankin’s poem, where the poet stumbles upon a ‘cloud’ and picks it up as if it were a ‘line’, which it, in turn, indeed becomes. In this movement, the poem illustrates what Harrison means by a poetry of ‘convergence, insight and sensation’, as it is less ideologically interested in what a poet can say about an environment (as per Wright’s poem above) and more interested in the ‘raw touch of experience on eye and mind, a self-discovery that proceeds at the same time as a Columbus-discovery of experience itself’ (Preoccupations 213). This approach allows Rankin to perform an imaginative break with the idea of auto- and anthropo-poiesis. This is an attempt to not pretend to ‘hold’ a unique connection to the environment or even mourn its destruction (as per Wright), but to bring into question whether, by focusing on the act of perception and the process of creation, she might be able to simply ‘reveal experience’ as opposed to framing ‘hypotheses’ or speculating ‘beyond’ the poem’s bounds (Merleau-Ponty in Carbery 12).
It should also be noted that Rankin’s ‘eco-poetic’ approach to writing environments did not emerge in a vacuum but was greatly influenced by her friendships with two of the aforementioned ecopoets, Robert Gray and Robert Adamson, and the painters John Olsen and David Rankin (her spouse), the latter of whom introduced her to concepts of ‘Zen aesthetics’ (Cassidy, ‘The Sounds’ 95). Rankin’s desire to find a more reparative way of not just representing but re-presenting environments from a less anthropocentrically skewed perspective – indeed, one that affects a Zen-like sense of nonduality – also speaks to her own belief that ‘we shall have to learn to move with it – to live with this land, within it and as part of its own cycle’ (Rankin in Cassidy, ‘The Sounds’ 95). Rankin’s procedural approach to writing place, as Bonny Cassidy further argues, allowed Rankin to resist ‘aggressive or conclusively interpretive’ ways of writing about place – as seen in Hope’s ‘Australia’, for example – in favour of being more open to ‘encounters with alterity, specifically, more-than-human phenomena’ (‘Pre-thought’ 512).
Increasing scholarship on decolonial ecopoetics has sought to highlight the reparative potential of an ecopoetics rooted in a sense of ‘making-with’. As Cassandra O’Loughlin notes, ‘an earth-centred consciousness decolonises the aesthetics of how we perceive Australia, heralding an aesthetic renewal following a history of colonial domination, manipulation and dispossession’ (17). O’Loughlin’s assertion is further supported by Peter Minter, who states that through ecopoetics, settler poets may be able to create a poetry ‘sympathetic to the vision of a decolonised Australia, a place where settler and Indigenous cultures have begun to find an existential common ground’ (‘Introduction’). From this perspective, we can perhaps interpret experiential poets experimenting with a poetics of sympoiesis, such as Rankin, as also seeking a less mythologised vision of Australian ecologies. That is, they are not simply evading the impact of colonisation on First Nations peoples and their respective Countries, but rather by engaging directly with Country, they are seeking to create a space in which, as Peter Minter suggests, ‘The country gets involved, speaks through it all’ (‘Introduction’).
To return to the essay’s key aim, this complex ethical-poetic bind – between choosing to implement, on the one hand, an experiential poetic of sympoiesis to writing the non-human (as evinced by Rankin), and on the other, engaging in a poetic that directly addresses colonisation’s ecocidal impact on First Nations lands (as evinced by Wright) – has become a defining feature of many contemporary settler ecopoets working ‘with’ place. It is important to emphasise, however, that these two approaches should not be thought of as fixed categories. Rather, many contemporary poets seek to intertwine or oscillate between these two approaches through a poetics that, like Wright and Rankin, is driven by a more distinctly self-reflexive engagement with the poem as process. This procedural approach to writing First Nations Country is particularly apparent in the works of contemporary ecopoets engaged in longform or extended place-based projects.
One of the most emblematic examples of this expansive ecopoetics can be seen in the place-based writing of renowned settler ecopoet John Kinsella. A prolific poet, prose writer and activist, Kinsella has been engaged in a decades-long commitment to unsettling anthropocentric, racist and extractive settler conceptions of Country through both a real and linguistic re-wilding of his home region on Noongar Country in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia. Woven throughout this oeuvre has been an obsession with the pastoral mode. However, as per my earlier discussion of Wright, Kinsella has sought to upend this very mode by developing ‘anti, post, counter, and radical’ pastoral approaches that seek to counter how the pastoral mode has been used to lay the ‘European rural’ over ‘Aboriginal land, working hard to obscure or obliterate memories of the past’ (‘The Pastoral’ 37). This critique has been further bolstered by Ivor Indyk, who noted in his reading of the Jindyworobaks that they were looking for a kind of pastoral poetry ‘to express an Aboriginal apprehension of the landscape’ (847). Building on Indyk’s reflections, Bundjalung poet and critic Evelyn Araluen has further noted that the pastoral was used for a range of ‘nationalist concerns – most saliently the ongoing articulation and justification for the cultural and geographic boundaries of the colony within, beyond, and against the imperial centres’ (sec. 3). More recently, Kinsella’s critique of the ‘pastoral’ form has become even more acute. In 2022, he defined the ‘Australian Pastoral’ as a ‘construct, a propaganda device that suits all sorts of oppressive modes’, and emphasised that his own approach to the form has sought to find a meaningful intersection between ‘pastoralism’ and ‘environmentalism’: ‘a means of considering where agricultural culpabilities intersect with personal histories and behaviours, where creativity that comes out of a critique of invasive and damaging wrongs is in itself up for question’ (Supervivid).
Kinsella’s subversive pastoral approach has been deployed across various extended poetic engagements with Noongar Country, including two trilogies, The Silo (1995) – The Hut (1998) – The New Arcadia (2005), and Jam Tree Gully (2012) – Fire Breaks (2016) – Open Door (2018), as well as in the book-length work, Sacre Coeur: A Salt Tragedy (2006). All these works (in addition to an array of other collections) combine to create what Kinsella terms a greater ‘life-cycle’ of poetry that presents an active attempt to acknowledge First Nations Country by demythologising both his own and settler society at large’s conception of the non-human world. To elucidate this counter-pastoral approach beyond rhetoric, I share here a poem, ‘Tawny Frogmouth Moon Negative Poem’, published in the last book of one of the aforementioned trilogies, Open Door (2018):
Two tawny frogmouths. One lifts and alights
white wedge with moon eyes on the branch of a York gum,
phantoming? The other – the male – large ‘haunted’ wood-feather
body and oranging catch-all-eyes, down on the gravel driveway.
I get out of the car, headlights on low-beam to counter moonshine,
headiness of the moment. It sticks and stares me out.
Not just transfixed, but involved in a politics
of belonging I can’t access. Its companion
watching closer than distance, and a telepathy
of half-lit dark at full-moon tilt something
I don’t really get, but suspect. In the intensity
of my ignorance and the saturate blessing of contact,
I know an entire ethical system is stretched never
to fall into its old shape. And Tim and Tracy
in the car looking on and into, vicarious
but deeply involved in their own dialogues
of silence. Then dogs across the valley barking crazily
and the tawny frogmouth on the gravel flying fast
into the shadows of tree angles, its companion – its partner? –
mirroring and silhouetting the developing night.
(171)
In this poem, Kinsella prioritises not only a non-human perspective – that is, in the suggestion that the tawny frogmouth is ‘involved in a politics / of belonging I can’t access’ – but also a glimmer of Harrison’s idea of the ‘linguistic converge of mind, eye, ear, and body’ with ‘Country’, perhaps best expressed in the lines where the poet evokes a degree of ‘telepathy’, of thought transference, not only between the two tawny frogmouths, but also in the ‘half-lit dark at full-moon’ dusk moment of ecological encounter he finds himself in: what he calls the ‘saturate blessing of contact’. Adding to this sense of sympoiesis, a ‘making with’, Kinsella questions this very sensation by proclaiming he does not ‘really get’ but merely suspects the significance of this very encounter. In doing so, he provides a more self-reflexive and overtly anti-colonial approach to ecopoetics – one that questions what he has described as the ‘ongoing colonialism of the poem itself’ (Open Door 13). This, I argue, is most obviously suggested in the poet’s admittance that he cannot ‘access’ the sense of ‘belonging’ the tawny frogmouths in the poems feel because he is limited by both his human ontology and by his position as a settler-Australian in a colonial state, where ‘an entire ethical system’, as the poem opines, has been stretched so far it can never ‘fall into its old shape’.
This latter quote also returns me to the key aim of this essay: of thinking about how poets negotiate the ‘settler problem’ through a heightened attunement to process, resulting in the act of negotiation becoming the poem’s central subject. In Kinsella’s poem, this sense of negotiation, of grappling with how to represent the ‘non-human’, can also be discerned on the level of form. This is evident, for instance, in the way short, sharp and seemingly ‘objective’ images (‘Two Tawny Frogmouths. One lifts and alights…’) juxtapose to longer, unwieldly ‘subjective’ reflections (‘In the intensity / of my ignorance and the saturate blessing of contact, / I know an entire ethical system is stretched never / to fall into its old shape’). This collage-like aesthetic further amplifies how the poet feels both a sense of connection and dislocation in response to the colonial context in which the non-human encounter is taking place.
Kinsella’s ability to admit his implication in colonisation’s attempt to destroy and replace First Nations kinship systems with a settler system predicated predominantly on extraction returns me to Tuck and Yang. In this poem, I suggest that Kinsella, similar to Wright, goes beyond creating a settler ‘move to innocence’, one that problematically attempts ‘to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity’, and instead speaks of ‘what is irreconcilable within settler colonial relations’ (Tuck and Yang 3, 4). Notably, it is through Kinsella’s overtly personal and lyrical engagement with ecologies that this has been achieved. This lyric ‘I’, as ecocritic Thomas Bristow has suggested, allows Kinsella to ‘settle the human back into the multivalent and incongruous contours of the more-than-human world that is an amalgam of difference, otherness and interdependence’ (46). Such a view provides a way of reading Kinsella’s commitment to what he calls the ‘counter-pastoral’ as an attempt to find an intersection between directly and openly mourning environmental destruction (as in Wright) and converging linguistically with Country (as in Rankin) by coming to terms with what he has described as the ‘problems of writing poetry “about” rurality and ecology in Australia’ (Supervivid). To return to Evelyn Araluen’s critique of the role the pastoral imagination has played in justifying the settler-colonial project – what she describes as a ‘myth imagining its own mythology’ – perhaps we can think of Kinsella’s poem, and the lifecycle of which it is a part, as providing an apt attempt to counter that idea: a myth unimagining its own mythology.
Conclusion: Towards an Ecopoetics of Uncertainty
Through this brief textual analysis of three settler ecopoems, I have shown how a self-reflexive, procedural approach to writing has become a central strategy for settler ecopoets attempting to grapple with the problem of ‘writing with’ the non-human in the long, ongoing shadow of colonisation. This strategy, I argue, perhaps stands as a key point of differentiation between the emergence of settler-Australian ecopoetry and other examples of ecopoetry in the Anglosphere. This approach to ecopoetry also links to Bonny Cassidy’s assertion that settler poets have been increasingly drawn to addressing ‘the fact of colonised geography, the fact of living and writing upon it’ in their works (‘Talking’ sec. 1). In doing so, they represent ‘a transformation of the settler’s body, identity and language’, thereby offering
poems that move through a decentred concept and poetics of land, place and belonging – those haunted themes of so much settler Australian poetry, from the colonial era to the contemporary (‘Talking’ sec. 1).
With Cassidy’s reflection in mind, we can come upon a way of seeing how the three poets discussed here also seek to decentre themselves in their works, and how this arguably results in a demythologising aesthetic: a way to add a subversive chapter to the stories that settlers used, and continue to use, to justify their place in the ‘founding myth of nation’ (Leane sec. 1).
The idea of decentring oneself in a poem also speaks to Lisa Slater’s recent discussion of how ‘settler-colonialism is socially reproduced through emotions’ and the role ‘uncertainty might play in reimagining political responsibility’ (818). For Slater, ‘certainty’, or the ‘refusal of uncertainty’, is fundamental to the ‘reproduction of settler colonialism’ as it presents a ‘denial of being implicated’ (818). As an antidote to this, Slater argues that by embracing ‘emotions’, which she describes as ‘not neutral’ or ‘de-politicized’ feelings but forces that ‘shape perceptions and order values, identity and senses of belonging’ (820), settlers may create a site for ‘ethical and political action’ (825). The embrace of emotional uncertainty, she further argues, is not about pursuing ‘good white politics’ or figuring out how to ‘belong better’, but rather about striving for an ‘anti-colonial approach’ that prioritises getting to know how and why settlers refuse to ‘relinquish privilege’ (822).
A ‘politics of uncertainty’ provides a useful way of interpreting the poems discussed here as engaged (to varying degrees) in a poetics of uncertainty, which is evident from Wright’s reflection at Cedar Creek, in which she no longer ‘remembers the formula for poetry’ (206), to Rankin who playfully allows a moment of encounter to counter a sense of poetic certainty, and Kinsella’s acknowledgement that the Tawny Frogmouths are ‘involved in a politics / of belonging’ he cannot access (171). To return to Slater, the politics (or poetics) of uncertainty evinced by the above poets, is evidently not about collecting ‘facts’ but ‘paying attention to the moments when the facts falter, to moments of doubt and hesitation’ (825). This suggests a way of embracing a sense of uncertainty that ‘implicates one in the here and now; in the messy, ordinary, contaminated world’ (825).
Acknowledgments
This project was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship while a DCA candidate at the Writing & Society Research Centre (WSU), as well as by a Landhaus Research Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany.
[1] The ‘Anthropocene’ was first put forward in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer, when they sought to acknowledge humankind as a ‘major geological force’ (17).
[2] Perhaps one of the most interesting ecopoetic oversights can be found in the work of the famed Chilean ‘anti-poet’ Nicanor Parra, who published a collection of poems that interrogated humanity’s destruction of the non-human world, aptly titled Ecopoemas, back in 1982. Parra’s oft overlooked suite of ecological poems provides just one example of the danger in coding contemporary ecopoetry as a uniquely US-born phenomenon solely due to a culturally imperialist position within the geopolitical order. It also provides an alluring premise for further research on ‘ecopoetry’ as a type of anti-poetry.
[3] For a more comprehensive look at the different routes an ecopoetic practice might take, see Jonathan Skinner’s 2011 essay, ‘Conceptualizing the Field’, which provides some ‘compass points for ecopoetics’.
[4] Despite this, it is important to note that Harrison does briefly state that ‘Aboriginal land practices and Aboriginal ancestral senses of custodianship’ have shaped this idea of ‘Country’ and that this ‘continuing Indigenous influence is often underacknowledged’ (101). Nevertheless, his only clear definition of a First Nations sense of ‘Country’ amounts to little more than stating that its ‘use oscillates all the way between how an Indigenous Australian might use it to describe where he or she comes from through to the self consciously academic adoption of the term as a tool to shift perceptions of ownership, care and environment within the larger geopolitical terrain of national life and ideas’ (101).
[5] In the West, the advent of the global environmental movement is often associated with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). In Australia, the advent of this movement is perhaps best epitomised by the formation of the United Tasmania Group (UTG) in 1972, a group that unsuccessfully attempted to stop the damming of Lake Pedder in Tasmania. Often noted as the world’s first ‘Greens’ political party, in 1982 the UTG would successfully see the Franklin River in South-West Tasmania protected from damming.
[6] Referred to as ‘Red Gold’ in the early years of Australian settlement, the Australian Red Cedar (Yugambeh: wudjeh; Latin: Toona Ciliata) played a central part in the natural, cultural and economic history of eighteenth and nineteenth-century New South Wales and Queensland. Logged almost to non-existence, today only a few living examples remain of what John Vader describes as ‘the tree that built a nation’ (2002).
[7] There is a wealth of research on the postcolonial-ecological ethos underpinning Wright’s poetry (and life), which this essay is unfortunately unable to adequately address. For further reading, see Gary Clark’s ‘The Two Threads of a Life: Judith Wright, the Environment and Aboriginality’ (2006), which reads Wright’s poetry as a ‘social ecological ethic’ (161); Jenny Kohn’s ‘Longing to Belong: Judith Wright’s Poetics of Place’ (2006), a critique of dualistic readings of Wright as a ‘celebrator of all things Australian’ on the one hand, and as an ‘activist’ and ‘campaigner’ on the other; John Charles Ryan’s ‘That Seed Sets Time Ablaze in Advance: Vegetal Temporality in Judith Wright’s Botanical Poetics’ (2017), a temporal analysis of how Wright’s poetic encounters with native Australian flora allowed her to counter the ‘marginalization of endemic forms of time – including the time of Indigenous seasons – in the Australian cultural landscape’ (164–165); or Amy Bouwer’s ‘I Sing to You/from My place with My Righteous Kin’: Judith Wright’s Decolonial Poetics’ (2024), a nuanced re-appraisal of Wright as a decolonial poet.
[8] Like Jennifer Rankin, John Blight was another significant, oft over-looked ‘eco-poet’ of the mid-late twentieth century. He worked predominantly, much like Rankin, in the littoral zone, and is most renowned for his extended ecopoetic engagements with the Queensland coastline, as reflected in two collections of sea sonnets, A Beachcomber’s Diary (1963) and My Beachcombing Days (1968).