Theme: Skills and Machines – A Living Partnership
Further information may be found at the Big Stuff 2025 website.
Big Stuff Conference took place from October 14th to 17th, 2025. This was the first Big Stuff conference to have 2 sites, as well as online participation. The main site was in Ghent, Belgium, hosted by the Museum of Industry and ETWIE (Centre for Expertise in Technical, Scientific and Industrial heritage) and the theme of the conference was Skills and Machines – A Living Partnership. A southern hub was held in Perth, Australia, and both sites hosted online participation. This resulted in the largest Big Stuff ever, with over 200 attendees overall.
Hosted by the vibrant Big Stuff Heritage community, this event was a gathering of museum professionals, academics, consultants, volunteers, and private owners dedicated to preserving and showcasing technological and industrial heritage.
In 2025, the focus was on the symbiotic relationship between skills and machinery. Industrial heritage encompasses not just large-scale installations and historic machinery, but also the people, skills, and knowledge required to operate, maintain and showcase this mechanical legacy. As the generations of workers and volunteers who have learned to control, calibrate and repair these machines retire, their invaluable expertise is at risk of being lost.
The conference explored effective methods for passing critical and endangered knowledge to new staff and volunteers, ensuring the continuity of this heritage. The scope was broad, and the community engaged in workshop and discussion sessions to discuss the future of industrial heritage.
Conference Recordings from Big Stuff 2025 (Perth)
Presentations from the Perth site are reproduced here by kind permission from the presenters and the host organisations. Watch this space also for upload of transcriptions of discussions from the Perth site, and presentation materials from Ghent.
Selected presentations will be published as articles in the Journal of Post-Medieval Archaeology.
