**The ‘Settler Problem’: Country and the (Im)Possibilities of a Settler Ecopoetics**

This essay interrogates the ethically-fraught venture of enacting a settler ecopoetics on the unceded lands of First Nations People—what this essay terms the ‘settler problem’ of ecopoetics. I argue this problem stands as a central preoccupation in Australian ecopoetry and stems not only from contemporary poets being complicit in the settler-colonial project, but also deeply entangled in the environmental misconceptions (or perhaps more aptly, mythconceptions) of their settler poetry forebears. The essay begins by thinking about key ecopoetic tendencies in Australian poetry before conducting a close reading of three poems by Judith Wright, Jennifer Rankin, and John Kinsella. Drawing on key First Nations theorists, including Puralia Meenamatta, Jeanine Leane, and Ambellin Kwaymullina, as well as ecocritical and postcolonial theorists, such as Phillip Hall, Martin Harrison, Kate Fagan, and Cassandra O’Loughlin, I analyse how Wright, Rankin, and Kinsella sought (in varying degrees) to negotiate the ‘settler problem’ through a more self-reflexive, procedural approach to writing and encountering First Nations Countries. I argue this process-based approach situates them in an ecopoetic lineage in which the poem, as a type of negotiation, renders a less mythological approach to environmental representation. In turn, the essay hopes to provide an alternative ‘demythologising’ framework for thinking about ecopoetics in colonial contexts, one which doesn’t seek to co-opt or reduce the act of decolonisation to that of a metaphor. In concluding, I draw on Lisa Slater’s ‘politics of uncertainty’ to further read Wright, Rankin and Kinsella as poets who were engaged in a type of ecopoetics of uncertainty: a way of creatively grappling with the (im)possibilities of their own writing practice.