Australia, like other white settler countries, has yet to become a state party to the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICHC). This paper identifies and examines the professional heritage discourse that both facilitates the Australian government’s reluctance to engage with the concept of intangible heritage and works to exclude a range of stakeholder groups from equitable participation in heritage policies and practices. The paper aims to do two things. First, I define the political power of heritage and the role it plays in the politics of recognition and justification in the context of Indigenous, multicultural and class politics. Second, I map the discursive strategies Australia ICOMOS has employed to engage with the idea of intangible heritage. I argue that there is a tension arising from the international recognition of ICH that destabilises previous authorized materialist understandings of heritage, and this tension is evident in how Australia ICOMOS has worked to translate the concept of ICH into the Australian Authorized Heritage Discourse. In the process of this translation, ICOMOS has effectively maintained both the forms and authority of expertise that are recognised by government policy makers as having authority over heritage issues. This, in turn, facilitates government inaction and continuing ignorance of the nature and significance of intangible heritage. Heritage, in both intangible and material forms, is subsequently continually remade and redefined as a-political, and its use in wider social justice struggles in Australia is de-legitimised.
