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The Comparing our Pasts (COP) project aimed to determine what Swedish and Australian pre-service history teachers know, understand and believe to be important about their nations’ past. In this study pre-service history teachers were asked to write a short history of their nation in their own words without using outside sources of information. This article reports on a preliminary analysis of resulting texts, comparing and contrasting their conceptualisations of Sweden and Australia and what aspects of history were manifest in the analysed data. Given that the participant group is situated in two different national contexts, this study aims to analyse how the pre-service teachers’ narratives of the nation can be understood as influenced by the national historical cultures of Sweden and Australia. The results show that the respondents’ narratives expressed both similarities and differences that highlight the pertinence of a historical cultural approach to history education and pre-service history teacher training that may be linked to the differing national historical contexts. These results are then used to argue the importance of an awareness of historicity in order to highlight and stress how our views of and approaches to national history is contextually contingent. This poses a challenge to history teacher training both in Sweden and Australia.