Northern Territory Senator Nova Peris says she has been dealing with racist hate mail on a daily basis since she spoke out against comments from Prime Minister Tony Abbott regarding the settlement of Australia.

Senator Peris, an Aboriginal woman from Darwin, spoke out against controversial comments from Mr Abbott who on Thursday addressed the Australian-Melbourne Institute conference.

"I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land," Mr Abbott told the group.

Senator Peris said those comments were wrong, and that since speaking out against them she has been the target of racial abuse.

"I have also been subject now to racial hate mail because I am standing up and saying that his statement is totally incorrect," Ms Peris said on Monday.

"Just stuff about you know 'give it up' you know I don't want to use those explicit words but basically 'we won, you lost'," Ms Peris said.

Ms Peris told ABC Darwin 105.7 that she had recently been with her children in Kakadu and the long evidence of Aboriginal existence on the land had highlighted to her how wrong the PM's comments were.

"There are paintings that are thousands of years old. To actually have our prime minister suggest that the country was unsettled was quite disturbing," she said.

"When you look at foreign investment you only have to go and talk to the Arnhem Land Aboriginal people who had been trading with the Macassans for hundreds of years before settlement here, and had a very successful trade," she said.

She said Mr Abbott was drawing a wedge between black and white Australia.

Ms Peris made the comments at the start of NAIDOC Week, which is held this year between from July 6.