In this essay Stuart Cooke argues against poetics of place. He begins by outlining three ways in which place-based thinking perpetuates elements of imperialist practice. Chiefly, thinking about place negates the diverse lives and forces upon which a habitat depends. Drawing on the work of Heriberto Yépez, Cooke concludes that place is an “absolutist fiction.” Instead, he turns to the lyrebird (Menura alberti and novaehollandiae) as a conceptual totem for an ethical, Australian poetics. Examining the presence (or absence) of the lyrebird in a selection of late twentieth-century and contemporary Australian poems, Cooke outlines how non-Indigenous Australian poets might learn from the lyrebird an alternative, ecological poetics that is not predicated on the eradication of multispecies complexity. The essay concludes with a brief account of a superb lyrebird’s poetics.