“A Chronology of the Development of Corporate Financial Reporting in Australia 1817 to 1988”

The aim of this paper is to present a chronology of the development of corporate financial reporting in Australia from 1817, when the first Australian company was formed, to 1988, the Australian Bicentennial year. Such a chronology may be useful to accounting historians and researchers in compactly presenting the multitude of changes which have occurred in financial reporting over these years. The chronology parallels similar chronologies of financial reporting in Britain (Nobes and Parker 1979), the USA (Zeff 1979) and in Canada (Murphy 1986).