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.
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