All settler-colonial societies face similar dilemmas. As new societies with populations that include both indigenous peoples and immigrants from diverse cultures and world regions, how can a collective sense of national identity, with a shared set of values, goals, and experiences, be constructed, or even imagined? How can settler societies explain and legitimate the process of nation-formation, and the original colonisation and dispossession of indigenous lands? How do they rationalise their historically exploitative and oppressive relations with indigenous peoples? How do they conceive of ongoing relations, and the place of indigenous peoples in contemporary society? These problems are particularly acute in the present, as indigenous peoples are asserting rights to land and self-government, in so doing challenging the very authority of the state and its official histories. How are conservative elements of settler societies responding to the questioning of official history, and to indigenous assertions of native title?

There is a remarkable similarity in the rhetoric of resistance to indigenous claims in settler societies today. In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, individuals and groups opposed to indigenous claims all argue that these claims violate the basic values and principles of liberal democratic societies: the equality of all citizens, the emphasis on individual rather than collective rights, and democratic (majority rule) government. While public opposition to Aboriginal rights is somewhat similar, the way in which claims to Aboriginal rights are perceived to conflict with national values and to be threats to the very integrity of the nation varies significantly according to the ways in which ideas of colonial nationhood have historically been constructed. In the remaining pages I wish to compare how ideas of settler history, nationhood, and ‘the frontier’ encounter between colonisers and indigenous peoples/wilderness are imagined in Australia and Canada. I do so by tracing the anti-native title discourse of two prominent right-wing political parties, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in Australia, and the Reform Party in Canada.^[34]