ABSTRACT
Born in 1917, Chambers had a difficult childhood. Experiences growing up in Newcastle, Australia, just prior to and during the Depression affected him in several ways. The death of his mother, Louisa, when he was four and his brother Albert Cyril was two meant his childhood was primarily spent with relatives. During the latter part of the 1920s and early ’30s both boys shouldered a lot of work in the milk-vending and newspaper businesses run by their father. This was while they attempted to complete their schooling. The pressures presumably hardened both to confront future life experiences, especially the inevitable setbacks. Joseph Chambers’ loss of around 90 per cent of the purchased goodwill (i.e., value from anticipating future income) when he sold his Sydney newspaper franchise after the Depression hit significantly influenced Chambers’ thoughts about the goodwill concept and how to account for it (chapters 5 and 6).
Regarding Chambers’ religious influences and desire to achieve social justice, we show that, in his writings and through the observations of his children, Chambers strove to ensure fairness in dealings generally, and in his academic life his preferred system of accounting was premised on the need for a level playing field through the provision of up-to-date disclosures. This would, he felt, go a long way to achieving the goal of commercial order. The early chapters also show that from the early stages of his academic career he found solace in music and the arts more generally. He was fascinated in artistic achievements, whose excellence, simplicity and concord at their greatest generally contrasted with what he saw all around in his accounting domain. Discord and complexity and the acceptance by the masses of these features were anathema to him.
Chambers’ primary and secondary school education was in Newcastle. With the benefit of a scholarship to take evening classes in economics at the University of Sydney, he graduated in 1939. Following practical stints in business and the government, he began teaching at Sydney Technical College. This was followed after several years with appointment as the first full-time senior lecturer, then the first full-time associate professor, in accounting (1953 and 1955) at the University of Sydney. He was appointed to the University’s foundation Chair of Accounting in 1960, a position held till his retirement in 1983.
After formally retiring, Chambers continued to work and publish at a prodigious rate until his untimely death in 1999. A brief account by two of the current authors (Clarke and Dean) and their Sydney colleague Murray Wells, The Sydney School of Accounting: The Chambers Years (SSA), records aspects of life in the Sydney School during those years. It made no pretence of being a complete history, but it captured the spirit of enquiry and experimentation, the excitement of discovery and the joy of teaching within the School. Chambers’ teaching skills had much to do with this.
