Reviewed by R. H. Parker Visiting Professor, University of New South Wales
Englishspeaking historians of twentieth century accounting, including those resident in Australia, have concentrated, with some justification, on developments in the UK and the USA. A few Australians in recent years have turned their attention to their own country. Although much of their work is mainly of local interest, some of it deserves a wider audience, for whilst Australians have learned accounting from the British and the Americans they also have made their own innovations. In any case American and British accountants may be able to discover, by observing a superficially similar environment and culture, which of their practices are exportable overseas and which are peculiar to their own countries.
Australian accounting is, as might be expected, similar to that in the UK and the USA but it is also recognizably different. From early British and later American influence has emerged a body of thought and practice which is neither British nor American.
To outside observers Australian accounting is most interesting for its lively academics, who have had an international influence out of all proportion to their numbers.
One of the leaders of Australian academic accounting for many years and the first fulltime teacher at an Australian university is Louis Goldberg. As part of a research project supported by Coopers & Lybrand, he was interviewed by Lee Parker in Melbourne in 1986. The results are available on the video cassette under review. The first impression of the re¬viewer, who has known the interviewee since 1960 and the interviewer since 1973, was how little both have changed over the years.
Parker is to be congratulated on this application of oral history techniques. Potential viewers should be aware, however, that what is provided is the audiovisual equivalent of research data rather than of a research paper. Some of the data is familiar from Goldberg’s 1982 book on accountancy education in Australia from 1945 to 1955 and his 1988 history of the Accounting Association of Australia and New Zealand, but there is much new material, especially on the period before 1945.
Goldberg has been associated with accounting teaching at the University of Melbourne since the 1920s and most of what he tells us is about Melbourne but, especially as concerns aca¬demic accounting, this is gain rather than loss as Melbourne University dominated accounting higher education in Australia until the 1960s. Although this is not mentioned in the interview, many of Goldberg’s former students have been responsible for the development of accounting teaching at other Australian universities.
From Goldberg’s account it is clear that accounting teachers in Melbourne followed neither UK nor US models very closely. British academic accounting (although not British professional accounting) was often more underdeveloped than its counterpart in Australia and the tyranny of distance meant that, in the early days at least, Australian accountants were simply ignorant of what was going on in the United States. In any case they found both UK and US textbooks not to their liking and started to write their own. Goldberg played a full part in contributing to this literature, although he is generous in his praise of the books that preceded it.
Relationships with the professional accountancy bodies were always important, especially as most of the early staff were practitioners teaching at the University parttime. Most notable of them was Alexander Fitzgerald, the man with the best claim to be the founding father of Australian academic accounting.
Accounting, as Goldberg himself once wrote, has (rather like Australia itself) both a long history and a short one. Many makers of the short history are happily still with us. Perhaps the most important role of this video cassette will be to serve as a good example to other researchers.
