In Australia the term ‘nation-building’ is most often associated with the heroic efforts of Colonial and Australian visionaries who recognised that the potential of the continent could be unleashed only through the direct financial and policy intervention of government. However, the term also carries different meanings and emphases in different contexts. For example, nation-building can refer to the re-building or establishment of the institutions of civil society in ‘failed states’ or even the reconstructing nations in the wake of ‘regime change’.

In this context, it might be said that, in a sense, Australia has in recent years shifted its nation-building efforts ‘off-shore’ to developing countries within its sphere of influence, such as the Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea, where it is engaged in restoring or establishing civil society institutions, or as part of its commitments to post-war/post regime-change reconstruction in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Social historians might approach the subject of nation-building as a form of national or cultural narrative in which the nation — or, more pertinently, the national identity — is the cumulative product of social, political and economic relations, relations between settlers and indigenous peoples, changing gender roles, the emergence of social movements or the experience of war.

Although each of these offers a legitimate and valuable lens onto our national identity, it is generally accepted in the Australian context that ‘nation-building’ refers to a deliberate policy framework whose aim is to construct the social and economic infrastructure of the nation state. For the purposes of this chapter, nation-building will be addressed as a policy frame which is, in part, an extrapolation of a ‘settler narrative’.