Nation-building in ‘new world’ nation-states of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, is a ‘settler’ narrative. It is a narrative concerned with taming the landscape, carving a country from the wilderness, conquering the ‘tyranny of distance’ and harnessing the land’s bounty for productive purpose.

In some ways the Australian narrative differs from that of other settler societies. For example, whereas Australia’s nation-building story is concerned with the struggle against a hostile landscape, physical isolation and remoteness from the ‘mother country’, the story in Canada is, in essence, about the geopolitical imperative of establishing a nation in a race against a powerful, ambitious and expansionist neighbour, the United States. The settler narrative of the United States, by contrast, is imbued with the notion of manifest destiny — the right, sanctioned by Divine Providence, to claim the continent for republican democracy.

Often, the nation-building story is a ‘retrospective narrative’: a lens for interpreting the past rather than a framework for charting a prospective future. As a retrospective narrative, there is, of course, a tendency to enlarge, embellish and emboss past events and even imbue them with almost mythic status.