This history of archaeology in Australia has been pretty well served since Mulvaney's highly influential survey of three hundred years of opinion about the nature of Australian Aboriginal people (1958). Indeed, the long-running debate about the identity of Australian archaeology, particularly about the extent to which it has developed a distinctive style, or whether its fundamental precepts and orientations remain essentially undeveloped derivations from English and North American influences, has tended to provide a ready market for research into the history of Australian archaeology.