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All Australian Aborigines have experienced the impact of Western culture to some extent which has resulted in the traditional cultures being irrevocably decimated. The reaction to the disintegration of traditional culture has been marked by a variety of outcomes. While some Aborigines have either accepted or reached a level of accommodation to the new order, others have responded in maladaptive ways. For some Aborigines, the disintegration of traditional culture and society has generated conflict, confusion and the disintegration of personality, which is conducive to the evolution of a dysfunctional group. It is the circumstances of and policy responses to dysfunctional Aboriginal groups, therefore, that is the concern of this article.

This chapter examines changing attitudes towards exhibiting Chinese immigration in New Zealand. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews with subject experts and visitors, three museums are discussed: national narratives at the New Zealand Maritime Museum in Auckland and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington; and regional representations at the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin.

The exhibition analysis shows that multicultural narratives of tangata tiriti immigration including Chinese only became prevalent in the 1990s, when changing attitudes in society at large and progressive immigration legislation influenced strategies of display.

These modernised national narratives propagate a multicultural paradigm. However, exhibiting Chinese immigration history constitutes only a small part of the larger mission of national museums. Accordingly, narratives of Chinese immigration remain superficial, serving celebratory representations of ethnic communities, while racism and discrimination are an important, but not central aspect of these narratives.

At the regional level, Toitū re-invented itself into a social history museum with a more inclusive and reconciliatory agenda, with a redesign in 2013 subsuming Chinese immigration into an intercultural narrative, featuring alongside other minority groups with a focus on cultural contact and exchange.

Nevertheless, all three museums still rely on narratives based on minorities and majorities arranged around a stable hegemony. Consultation and cooperation with Māori also reveal the wish to be presented as first people, set apart from tangata tiriti. That way biculturalism seems to act as a dividing force spatially, but thematically both immigration histories are more and more intertwined.

The correspondence recently in the T.L.S., rising from a reader's failure to get a certain work of fiction from a branch library in a great city, raised once again the charge that the public librarian was a censor, an office for which, it was indignantly assumed, he had neither capacity nor authority. The subsequent letters reiterated the arguments with which every experienced librarian is only too familiar: that public librarians operate with limited funds and “select” books of which they know their readers have need. They cannot provide every book. It is always fiction that raises this hubbub from the reader who assumes that he should be provided with anything his fancy suggests at the expense of his fellow ratepayers, many of whom may greatly dislike the book in question. As Mr. O'Leary, in his part of the symposium wrote, any form of censorship may not only be wrong ; it may be fatuous. The whole history of literature indicates that. But librarians are trusted by the community to give what is best to the greatest number of people and, if they do not stock particular books, this, as another correspondent points out, is not censorship if the book can be got through any bookseller or at the subscription libraries, although the latter were compelled to experiment some years ago with a form of exclusion. That is not unreasonable seeing that thousands of readers come upon books as it were by accident and are often displeased at what they find ; and it is useless, to be quite practical, to point out that no one need read a book he finds to be offensive, and all should at least try to determine the character of any book they intend to read. Obviously, as we have long known, the question is complicated and these and many other factors have to be borne in mind in practice.

THE effective little conference of the London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association at Brighton gave clear proof of the value of and desire for such gatherings. This experience, we are confident, will be understood by our Council and a national conference should be possible in 1946. At Brighton, amongst many good things, from the public lecture by Charles Morgan to the excellent symposium by the Service members, there was the important statement by Mr. Goldsack, Chairman of the National Book League and a well‐known publisher, on the state of British stocks of books. A census made by publishers and booksellers had revealed that some 50,000 basic books, which are required continuously by libraries, schools and the general reading world, are out‐of‐print. It may be recalled that forty years ago James Duff Brown asserted “of real, living works of literary and human interest, there are perhaps not more than 20,000 in the English language,” and if more than twice that number of books are unavailable the condition would seem to be parlous. Of course the quotation we have made is not acceptable today nor is the statement unqualified in the Berwick Sayers' editions of Brown's Manual, but Mr. Goldsack's figures give us furiously to think. We are bound to keep in every town and county a representative collection of books of every age and we do know that there is the insistent demand for current books; for some readers, indeed, this means current fiction; lacking that we are labelled as “useless” by the most vocal part of the community of readers.