The popular answer is that cultural heritage is the things, places and practices that define who we are as individuals, as communities, as nations or civilisations and as a species. It is that which we want to keep, share and pass on.

As a field of scholarship, Cultural Heritge has emerged over the past forty or fifty years when universities (especially in the United Kingdon, Europe and North America) diversified beyond the orthodox and traditional disciplines and into new fields of enquiry that were cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary.

At the same time, collections in museums, archives, libraries and galleries became a topic of study in their own right, so too did national parks, sacred places, historic buildings and entire landscapes. Popular consciousness of heritage increased with the work of the organisations like the National Trust, National Parks Associations and activist citizens groups dedicated to saving things great and small. UNESCO and other government and non-government agencies established international registers, agreements, structures and rules. Arguably heritage became more valued and vital as the pace of historical change quickened and the scale of destruction increased. Axes gave way to chain saws and picks and sledge-hammers gave way to bulldozers so the need for understanding and protection increased.

The debate continues as to whether cultural heritage is a discipline in itself or a cluster of disciplines which have a particular collective focus. The relationship of cultural heritage to the conventional disciplines remains problematic; history, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, theology, literature.

For David Lowenthal, heritage is known in ways utterly unlike history. Lowenthal is one of the most persuasive and eminent writers in the relatively recent field of cultural heritage. He gets to the nub of the issue about historical veracity and popular belief which heritage struggles to straddle. He continues: Like medieval relics, heritage is sanctioned not by proof of origins but by present exploits. No one in the 14^th century would have thought to test the Turin Shroud, said to have enfolded Christ; what mattered was the shrouds current miraculous efficacy. The worth of heritage is likewise gauged not by critical tests by by current potency.

He says that if historians despise the fakery of heritage then heritage is disdainful of the historians fetish for finding historical truths. Lowenthal uses William Bligh and the mutiny on the Bounty as an example. The film versions are less concerned with an historically accurate portrayal of Bligh than are the historians so the widest common understanding of Bligh and the Bounty is that of popular culture rather than high minded history. A villain on film makes for a good story. Historians quibble. The late gret Australaian historian Greg Denings classic history of the mutiny on the Bounty allows for the heritage version by presenting the Bounty as a floating stage on which a play unfolded as a set of performances. Dening, with a rare historians skill seamlessly, almost invisably blends history with a heritage version. So, heritage may wilfully reproduce the myths and legends that historians strive to dispell. For example, 'Ned Kelly was a wronged man and an accidental hero? Discuss'.