TAYLOR,GRIFFITH AND THE SE AUSTRALIAN HIGHLANDS - ISSUES OF DATA SOURCES AND TESTABILITY IN INTERPRETATIONS OF LONG-TERM DRAINAGE HISTORY AND LANDSCAPE EVOLUTION

Much of the current research on long-term landscape evolution and drai nage history in SE Australia is built in one way or another on the ear ly work of Griffith Taylor. The controversy prompted by several attemp ts to incorporate Taylor's work in recent plate tectonics interpretati ons 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 reconstruct ions of long-term landscape history, testability of such reconstructio ns, and the relationship between the landscape history so reconstructe d and larger-scale, regional landscape histories, appear not to have b een addressed in recent literature on geomorphological methodology. Th is literature notes the demise of critical rationalism and appears to espouse a strongly relativist viewpoint, which relies on the shaved un derstanding among the discipline's practitioners as to what are approp riate data sources and tests for hypotheses of long-term landscape evo lution. 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 underst andings of the appropriate data sources and tests for our hypotheses a nd grand schemes of the type so favoured by Griffith Taylor.