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The University of Western Australia Business School's Emeritus Professor Philip Brown has become one of five inaugural inductees into Australia's first Accounting Hall of Fame.

The Australian Accounting Hall of Fame was last week launched at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Brown has been recognised for his research and teaching contributions. After graduating from the University of New South Wales and winning a scholarship to the University of Chicago, he transformed the world of accounting and finance when, in 1968, a paper he co-authored with Professor Ray Ball was published in the Journal of Accounting Research. Titled ‘An empirical evaluation of accounting income numbers,' the research examined the relationship between stock market fluctuations and company financial announcements.

‘Philip Brown is without peer in Australia, and is amongst the most respected accounting scholars in the world,' said Winthrop Professor Izan, Deputy Dean of the UWA Business School. ‘His research with Ray Ball received the American Accounting Association's inaugural award for Seminal Contributions to the Accounting Literature'. The award noted that their research revolutionized our understanding of the impact of corporate disclosure on share prices, and of earnings releases in particular, and laid the foundation for much of the modern accounting literature.

Professor Brown was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1979, and was appointed as a Life Member, Accounting Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2000. He has also won numerous awards and held various visiting professorships.

In the early years of his appointment at UWA, Professor Brown helped to develop the MBA program. In 1973, the UWA course became one of the first MBAs to be offered within Australia.  Two years later, he was appointed as the founding Dean of the Australian Graduate School of Management, where he was responsible for laying the foundations of an internationally competitive MBA school.  The AGSM is now part of the Australian School of Business.

He returned to UWA as a professor in 1980, and continued to contribute to the accounting and finance discipline in various leadership roles. Today, he holds joint appointments with The University of Western Australia and the University of New South Wales.

The Hall of Fame's other inaugural inductees are: Elizabeth Alexander, former president of CPA Australia; Sir Alex Fitzgerald OBE, the founder of Fitzgerald & Tompson (now Ernst & Young); prodigious researcher Ray Chambers AO, the first non-American to be included in the Ohio Accounting Hall of Fame; and Reg Gynther, who helped change the accounting discipline by extending research training. The five inductees were chosen from a list of 16 nominations by a panel of 24 in a preferential ballot.

‘Accounting in Australia has a long and distinguished heritage, dating back to the late nineteenth century, and we thought it was high time we honoured the individuals whose achievements have been immense and whose impact on the development of the discipline over that time have been profound,' said Phill Cobbin, Hall of Fame Director and Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Business and Economics.

The hall of fame inductees or representatives from their families were presented with a leather bound citation and testamur at a dinner at the University of Melbourne on October 8.

Media Reference

Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
E: [email protected]

Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
E: [email protected]