Following a year of informal discussions with historians, heritage professionals and labour movement leaders on the need to give labour heritage a stronger profile in the Australian community a Labour Heritage Network was launched on 20 February 1995 by Terry Irving and Lucy Taksa. The rationale for this initiative was the realisation that while a growing interest in labour heritage in other countries had resulted in the creation of national museums and archives of labour history and working life, in Australia such interest has been fragmented. Collections are dispersed among a multiplicity of institutions, temporary exhibitions often remain hidden under the beds of those activists and artists who produced them, important sites go unrecognised and buildings are often demolished. Efforts to preserve the heritage of the organised labour movement and of labour itself have also been circumscribed by sectional interests and activities. Only after focussed investigation did we discover that labour heritage museums and activities are being contemplated or established by several bodies, such as the Labor Councils of NSW and Western Australia. Despite the national significance of our labour heritage, up to the present time it has received little formal recognition. Australia is bereft of labour heritage registers or educational kits for school children. Rarely do those government agencies involved in heritage preservation fund distinctly labour-oriented projects. Moreover, the potential of labour heritage to contribute to citizenship education has been neglected. How has this state of affairs occurred? In many cases, labour heritage has been obscured by the heritage profession's tendency to subsume it under the umbrella of industrial archaeology or to dissolve it into the industrial and social aspects of the built environment. This is hardly surprising when one considers the all encompassing nature of labour heritage. It can include documents and other forms of material culture, monuments, landscapes and recollections associated with paid work in the mines, the railways and other forms of transport, mills and factories, the waterfront, the office block and so on, and also with unpaid work in the home; with trade unions and the political parties of labour and the Left; with the living conditions and recreational activities of workers, their families and communities. This very wide-ranging nature makes labour heritage hard to define. In turn, definitional problems make it difficult to assess significance and to undertake appropriate preservation activities, not to mention to obtain funds for such purposes. By contrast, industrial heritage tends to be distinct and coincides with widespread interest in technology. In fact an extensive literature exists on the subject of industrial heritage and particularly industrial archaeology.1 But because the significance of industrial sites and machinery tends to be evaluated by architects and industrial archaeologists, historians and specifically labour historians have become marginalised. Consequently, workers have tended to be reduced to a passive presence in representations of industrial heritage. More importantly, the conflation of labour