This being said, I think books and articles on the internet are a great resource, I’m just far more inclined to print out the pages I want when I find them, because I don’t want to get distracted and loose what I am working on. But before I get condemned for being a horrible tree killer I would like to point out that I only buy recycled paper,  print on both sides of my paper, and when I am done with it I stick it into a paper recycling bin so that it can be used again. I personally cannot sit and read a computer screen for more than 20 minutes, it hurts my eyes, even when I have my glasses on and there seems to be no other solution for this other than to print the pages and read them. In 2006, 95% of Victorian households recycled their paper products. With this trend towards recycling paper, it can be reasonable to suggest that in the future recycled paper will be utilised far more than new paper, and as such I don’t believe that printing articles on paper or printing books will continue to be a large burden on the environment, especially with sustainable forests and green practices being introduced into all sorts of industries.

Like a majority of people I am against the destruction of old growth forests, which I understand have in the past and in some cases still today provide the paper to print books. This practice however is slowly dieing out as public opinion is changing. Sustainable ecologically friendly harvesting of trees allows for as little impact on the planet as possible. Many publishing companies are there for getting behind this practice such as Bloomsbury publishing, who publish the Harry Potter series. Books themselves aren’t something that really get wasted, they aren’t like office paper that gets thrown out (and hopefully recycled) when it’s finished with, people usually read them more than once or give them to other people when they are done with them. They aren’t thrown out frivolously, therefore aren’t produced over and over again for the same people to use. I think that for the sake of record and sentimentality books should continue to be produced. It’s hard to believe that even with the most recent digital photography photo paper will ever become obsolete, because hard copy photos are something people like to have as well as give to others, as are books.

Doing a quick search of Google, I found a number of sites which have large numbers of books, the first that came up in fact had 20,000 digitised books. I personally had never looked for books online, it seems kind of absurd to me really, even though my first point of call for almost every essay I have ever written is Google Scholar, (because really who has time to search around a library). I’m sure many people other than myself, especially in older or less affluent communities, would not realise that you could find what you like to read online, let alone have the skills or resources to do so. This leads me to believe that with the possible future absence of hard copy books, people will read less. It depresses me a little that after all of my university readings I don’t really feel like reading for leisure, and that when I do have time I can’t find things I like to read. In my opinion though with the culture of inactivity that is emerging in our society reading for ideas and entertainment rather than purpose will die out if, (more often than not unreliable) digital technology is relied upon for this. To summarise, I don’t think that using paper for books is a bad thing, especially with today’s trend towards saving the planet.

It seems to me that there is myth of a multicultural Australia, accepting people from far and wide, where in fact this has only been a recent development. The timeline of immigration in Victoria really highlighted this to me. It also seemed somewhat foreign that in a country such as Australia laws such as the 1903 Naturalization act (which denies non-Europeans the right to apply for naturalization), and the Immigration Restriction Act (which introduced a dictation test almost impossible for non-European migrants to pass), were able to be passed. Thinking about these things with 21^st century disgust, I then realised I needed to put these situations into context – Europe not only created, but also shaped Australia in the beginning. The British did not come to Australia to help the native people strive for a better life, they came to further their own empire, to gain more land and extend their reach across the world. In Australia they no doubt wanted an extension of the mother land, with their own values and multiculturalism does not fit in with this. The White Australia Policy is a perfect example of this, it came about some time around federation, and lasted a number of decades, the slightly disturbing part being that it wasn’t until 1973, that the Labor government removed the last traces of the policy. By the 60’s I would have expected Australia to be more accepting than this.

The other thing that took me back when visiting the museum was the way that aborigines were affected by the immigration of the British. I obviously knew that they weren’t treated as equal citizens even though their land was being taken from them. Clearly any educated person in Australia will have been taught about some of the atrocities perpetrated against aborigines, the widespread, unnecessary massacres and the stolen generations probably being the worst and most well noted.  Australia being the good democratic nation that it is, was one of the first in the world to allow suffrage to women. I had never thought about, nor realised that at this time, suffrage was not extended to aboriginal Australians, commonwealth franchise was in fact only extended to them in 1962. If I had ever taken the time to think about this, I probably would have realised that they wouldn’t have received the same rights as migrants because of the way the commonwealth viewed them, but it is something that is skimmed over in schools when you learn about suffrage.

When I reached the getting in exhibition I sat down and tried my hand at being a customs officer form the 1920’s. I was particularly surprised by the Chinese woman, (who I personally would have let into the country since she had been here for 6 years and also had 2 Australian born children and an Australian born husband),  that was told to leave the country. Being from Ballarat, I somehow believed that even though Australia didn’t particularly like Asian immigrants in the 1920’s and earlier, they somewhat accepted them anyway. This is because not only is there quite a prominent Chinese cemetery in Ballarat right around the corner from my house, but also as a child going to Sovereign Hill on excursions we were shown around Chinese dwellings and were told how the Chinese prospectors left their mark on and helped fuel the gold rush. As such I was particularly surprised to stumble across a placard in the museums telling of the 1857 Act to regulate the Residence of the Chinese Population in Victoria.

I guess that fact that Australia was a colonised country leads to these problems, because essentially a nation is being created where previously there was not one, there were no state borders and no governmental restrictions. As such something exclusionist is obviously going to be created when a national identity is created because it never really existed before. This past has lead to things that we today may think are unnecessarily racist, such as the One Nation Party, as well as the xenophobic views many people have about refugees and the media blowups resulting from these, (Tampa, hungers strikes and children overboard scandals). The only consolation I guess is that the atrocities of the past have enabled as well are required things such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be created to ensure that these things cannot occur in any form again.