Strehlow's book challenged some of the findings of Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen in their highly acclaimed work "The Native Tribes of Central Australia", at that time accepted as the last word on the Aranda. This led to a major controversy in London anthropological circles involving Andrew Lang, Sir James Frazer, A.A. Marett, A.C. Haddon, Baldwin Spencer and later Bronisław Malinowski. Central to the debate was the question of whether Aboriginal people were primitive people on a lower level to Europeans (Frazer and Spencer's view) or a decadent people who had previously been on a higher level of culture (Strehlow's view, based on his knowledge of the language). Strehlow's researches were taken up by Andrew Lang and N.W. Thomas in England, by Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Arnold van Gennep in France, by Fritz Graebner in Germany and Pater W. Schmidt in Austria, and were a major source for Bronislaw Malinowski's "The Family among Australian Aborigines". A translation of "Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme" into English was completed in 1992 by Rev. Hans Oberscheid and is still awaiting publication.