Australian Dictionary of Biography

Raymond Chambers, no date

Courtesy of the family and the University of Sydney Archives

Raymond John Chambers (1917–1999), academic accountant, was born on 16 November 1917 at Newcastle, New South Wales, elder son of English-born Joseph Chambers, labourer, and his Queensland-born wife Louisa, née Mogg. Louisa died in the early 1920s, and Raymond and his younger brother Albert lived separately with relatives for a time, until Joseph had reorganised his affairs. In 1923 Joseph married Mabel Esme (May) Hermann. Ray attended Newcastle Boys’ High School, before being awarded a public exhibition to study at the University of Sydney (BEc, 1939), where he attended evening classes. Awaiting the scholarship decision, his parents had enrolled him in an accounting certificate correspondence course. He later recalled: ‘I paid for it and studied it in irregular instalments over the next five years’ (Chambers 1996, 102).

During the day Chambers worked as a junior clerk in the New South Wales Department of the Attorney-General and of Justice. In 1938 he joined the private sector, working first for three years at the Shell Company of Australia Ltd and then for two years at Electricity Meter and Allied Industries Ltd. He became a fully qualified accountant in 1941. At Christadelphian ecclesia gatherings in Sydney he met Margaret Scott Brown, a commercial teacher; they were married on 9 September 1939 at the Christadelphian Hall, Hurstville. He would be an occasional Christadelphian lay preacher, in a denomination without clergy that existed as a network of separate congregations. His faith explicitly precluded him from serving in the military in World War II. It would also inform his rejection of accounting conventions of the day that obscured, he believed, a fair, useful, and true understanding of the financial measures of the assets and liabilities reported by a business periodically (for example, in its annual financial statements). In 1943 he began work as an investigations officer at the Commonwealth Prices Commission.

Changing careers in 1945, Chambers began his first full-time academic appointment as a lecturer at Sydney Technical College. Drawing on practical wartime experiences, he helped to develop one of the first management education programs in Australia. He taught financial and cost accounting as well as general management, and developed a course on financial management. Research for those courses entailed a quest for more evidence of accounting’s infelicities, concern about its addiction to dogma, and formulation of a theoretically based system of accounting to aid decision-making founded on principles drawn from the domain of commerce.

Remaining at the college until 1953, Chambers was then appointed to the University of Sydney’s first full-time position in accounting as senior lecturer in the faculty of economics. In 1955 he was promoted to associate professor, before becoming the foundation professor of accounting in 1960. He became a member of the Social Sciences Research Council of Australia in 1966. In 1973 he was awarded a doctorate of science in economics for contributions to accounting thought and education—developing a novel, revolutionary theory of accounting based on a decision-usefulness perspective, which remedied the drawbacks of the instrumentation system. An entity’s assets and liabilities were to be reported at their current market selling prices, rather than their historical cost or discounted present values of future returns, thereby showing its financial position, capacity for adaptation, and flexibility. He described his system as Continuously Contemporary Accounting (CoCoA). The post-2000s professionally endorsed system described as fair value accounting adopted several of its features.

Climbing the ranks of academe, Chambers forged enduring relationships with leading practitioners. He seemed equally at ease in any company. A workaholic, he described himself as an academic loner living on the fringe, observing and jotting down his ideas for reforming the theory and practice of the discipline. He published prodigiously, producing during his career numerous books and hundreds of articles and submissions, as well as delivering several hundred lectures around the world. His major theory articles were ‘Blueprint for a Theory of Accounting’ (1955), ‘The Conditions of Research in Accounting’ (1960), and the 1961 research lecture ‘Towards a General Theory of Accounting.’ Those works underpinned his 1966 seminal work of theory, Accounting, Evaluation and Economic Behavior. He accumulated evidence supporting his theory over several decades, publishing it in Securities and Obscurities: A Case for Reform of the Law of Company Accounts (1973) and An Accounting Thesaurus: 500 Years of Accounting (1995). In 1976 he visited the United States of America as the first overseas American Accounting Association distinguished international lecturer. His Sydney School of Accounting educated or trained eighteen people who would become accounting professors in Australia and overseas.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, practical experiences and circumstances—including membership and high office in professional organisations, directorship of Nestlé Australia (1967–89), and numerous consultancies, beginning in 1955 with John P. Young and Associates—caused Chambers to question why practicality and accounting dogma were at odds. His expert advice was frequently sought for inquiries into the construction, property, sugar cane, stevedoring, oil and gas, and steel industries, as well as in relation to a variety of management controversies about dividend constraints, pricing, valuation of property, revenue recognition, and civil auditor negligence actions. He also advised major law and accounting firms, business associations, large corporations—such as the Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd and the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. Ltd—and Federal and State government departments and public agencies.

Chambers was influential in one of Australia’s major professional accounting bodies, the Australian Society of Accountants. During the 1960s, together with Russell Mathews and Lou Goldberg, he oversaw several Australian education initiatives, such as the differentiation of accounting education from training and ultimately the requirement for a university degree for entry into the profession. In 1975 he became one of the few academic accountants to be appointed an ASA State (New South Wales) president; he subsequently became national president (1977–78).

Appointed AO in 1978, Chambers was made an emeritus professor upon his retirement at the end of 1982. He received honorary doctorates in science from the University of Newcastle (1990) and the University of Wollongong (1993) and in law from Deakin University (1992). In 1991 he was inducted into the Ohio State University’s Accounting Hall of Fame, and in 2010 he would be an inaugural inductee into the University of Melbourne’s Australian Accounting Hall of Fame. ‘A very private person’ (Wells, Jensen, and Chambers 1992, 81), outside of his work he enjoyed opera. He died on 13 September 1999 at Darlinghurst, survived by his wife and their two daughters, Margaret and Rosemary, and one son, Kevin, and was cremated.