Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) is now remembered as an approximation of the anthropological method that would soon be conventional: a comprehensive study of a delimited area, based on sustained fieldwork, portraying a population's distinctive character. In 1913, however, Bronislaw Malinowski said of Spencer and Gillen's studies that ‘half the total production in anthropological theory ha[d] been based upon their work, and nine-tenths affected or modified by it’. Native Tribes inspired an intense international debate, orchestrated by J. G. Frazer, broker of the book's publication, predicated on the assumption that indigenous Australians were the most primitive of living peoples, whose totemism was somehow at the base of civilization's highest achievements – monogamous marriage and truly spiritual religion. But the debate proved irresolvable in Frazer's terms. Pondering conflicting interpretations of totemism, anthropologists rejected unilinear models of social evolution like Frazer's. Nationally differentiated populations of professional anthropologists emerged in the early twentieth century, developing distinctive theoretical schemes. Nevertheless, some issues central to the debate remained vital. For example, how were magical, scientific and religious modes of thought and action to be distinguished? And in Australia, analyses of indigenes were distinctively construed. White settlers, concerned to legitimate colonial rule, asked specific questions: did Aborigines have established ties to specific lands? Were Aborigines capable of civilization? Biogeographical theory underpinned Spencer's relatively liberal conclusions, which had precursors and successors in Australian anthropology: Aborigines had defined criteria of land ownership, their habits were suitable adaptations to their circumstances, and observed cultural diversity among Aborigines denoted their ‘nascent possibilities of development along many varied lines’.

Among historians and sociologists of science, it is a commonplace that scientists' accusations of plagiarism defy straightforward explanations. To appreciate that these accusations need not indicate simply that given individuals have claimed others' ideas as their own, it is important to remember that scientists' habits of communication create specialized research communities in which professional practices are – and are intended to be – relatively standardized. A defining property of science is, after all, that it requires practitioners to reach consensus about solutions to their common research problems, in pursuit of which disciplinary colleagues are expected to exchange regular reports of their theories, information, materials and techniques. Certainly, patterns of behaviour do not fully realize the scientific ideal; there is no end of evidence that scientists’ communications may be less than fully frank, that their judgements are affected by diverse personal considerations, and that their research is shaped by peculiarities of places and things. But to find disparities between the real and the ideal does not mean that the ideal does not inform occupational practices. And because scientists belong to exchange networks, their standardized practices are virtually guaranteed to lead to so-called ‘simultaneous discoveries’. Sometimes, when two or more scientists reach a given conclusion at the same (or nearly the same) time, their agreement occasions mutual congratulations, since it confirms the appropriateness of scientists' shared interpretations. (When in 1858, for example, prominent British scientists celebrated Charles Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's independent formulations of the concept of natural selection, they rendered the concept less controversial than it might have been had it been advanced by one man alone.) At other times, however, a scientific event that might be regarded as a simultaneous discovery under some circumstances instead becomes an occasion for expression of discord among interested scientific parties, prompting a ‘priority dispute’ or (worse) an accusation of plagiarism.