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In Australia national history and the teaching thereof continues to be controversial. Concerns over whose history is being taught in schools (Blainey, 1993; Donnelly, 1997), parallels anxieties over what the public knows about their nation’s past (Ashton, Connors, Goodall, Hamilton, & McCarthy, 2000; Ashton & Hamilton, 2007). In Sweden, on the other hand, national history does not have a dominant role in public discourse or research on history education. This lack of attention could, however, also be problematic (Lozic, 2010; Nordgren, 2006).

Using an open-ended narrative methodology inspired by Canadian researcher Jocelyn Létourneau (2006), the Comparing our Pasts (COP) project aimed to determine and compare what Swedish and Australian pre-service teachers, as an important group when it comes to their future influential position in schools, know, understand, and believe to be important about their countries’ past. This paper reports on the preliminary analysis of the pre-service teachers’ narratives, comparing their perception of the nation as a geographical, cultural, or constitutional entity as well as Swedish and Australian stories of foundation and conquest. Furthermore, the paper examines the way the participants framed their narratives and the lens they used to relate and interpret their respective national histories and their understanding of the nation and the past.