Andrew McGahan’s 2004 novel The White Earth has as its thematical focus the white settler perspective of the Australian Native Title Act, passed at the close of 1993. The key issue of land rights is expressed by foregrounding the question of who belongs to the land, rather than simply asking whom the land belongs to. In this way, possession is central to the novel. In addition to questions of who owns the land, who ‘ought’ to own the land, and, ultimately, whether land can be owned, the novel dwells on the notion of being possessed by the land or its spirits. ‘Country’ ideas of hard work, frontier, the sublime and quest are developed and contrasted with more ‘City’ ideas about class, the establishment of civilization and bequests. Such issues aside, and following the title of the novel, this paper will address issues of race/ethnicity (White) and the land (Earth). Several passages within the novel emphasize that the land has a voice which can be heard. By emphasizing that it is for humans to hear this voice, The White Earth draws on tropes familiar to readers of ‘nature’ or ‘place’ writing. That these humans are explicitly both black and white means that this novel moves beyond Western tropes of Pastoral or Wilderness common to such writing, and offers a platform to explore the postcolonial (specifically postcolonial settler) issues often backgrounded in ecocritical thought.