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ABSTRACT Much of the current research on long-term landscape evolution and drainage history in SE Australia is built in one way or another on the early work of Griffith Taylor. The controversy prompted by several attempts to incorporate Taylor's work in recent plate tectonics interpretations of the long-term evolution of SE Australia highlights differences of opinion as to the appropriate methodologies for such investigations. These questions, including the issues of data sources in reconstructions of long-term landscape history, testability of such reconstructions, and the relationship between the landscape history so reconstructed and larger-scale, regional landscape histories, appear not to have been addressed in recent literature on geomorphological methodology. This literature notes the demise of critical rationalism and appears to espouse a strongly relativist viewpoint, which relies on the shared understanding among the discipline's practitioners as to what are appropriate data sources and tests for hypotheses of long-term landscape evolution. This offers little hope for resolution of the current disputes about the evolution of the drainage systems of SE Australia, but puts the onus squarely on us, the practitioners, to develop shared understandings of the appropriate data sources and tests for our hypotheses and grand schemes of the type so favoured by Griffith Taylor.
KEY WORDS Methodology in geomorphology; Australia; Eastern Highlands; landscape history; drainage systems; data sources; plate tectonics; denudational terrains.
Introduction
One of the major outcomes of the plate tectonics revolution has been a renewed emphasis on large-scale (global) tectonics and geomorphology (for example, Summerfield in press). Regional-scale geomorphology and long-term landscape evolution are now central to increasingly sophisticated conceptual and numerical models that attempt to integrate sub-aerial landscape evolution, long-term denudation, and active and passive tectonics, commonly in the context of plate tectonic interpretations of regional-scale landscape evolution (for example, Lister et al. 1986; Lister & Etheridge 1989; Summerfield 1991; Gilchrist et al. 1994; Howard et al. 1994; Kooi & Beaumont 1994; Pazzaglia & Gardner 1994; Steckler & Omar 1994; Tucker & Slingerland 1994; van der Beek et al. 1995; Seidl et al. 1996). Data from large-scale geomorphology and landscape history can be used to test plate tectonic models (for example, Bishop 1986), and numerical models of plate tectonic evolution are in turn generating new understandings and questions concerning theories of long-term...