00074918.2012.728659

(1)

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbie20

Download by: [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] Date: 18 January 2016, At: 00:29

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

Ruth Daroesman

Anne Booth

To cite this article:

Anne Booth (2012) Ruth Daroesman, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic

Studies, 48:3, 421-425, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2012.728659

To link to this article:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2012.728659

Published online: 20 Nov 2012.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 185

(2)

In Memoriam

RUTH DAROESMAN

Anne Booth

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

Ruth Daroesman was the irst Assistant Editor of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies. She joined the ANU in 1968 and for the next 15 years worked alongside

Professor Heinz Arndt, head of the then Department of Economics in the Research School of Paciic Studies, in building the journal’s standard and reputation. As well

as editing the content and overseeing production, Ruth pursued her scholarly

in-terest in Indonesian education and its inancing, and wrote economic surveys of

several Indonesian provinces. This tribute contains contributions from colleagues who were graduate students, academic staff and visitors in the department during Ruth’s term there.

Ruth was born in 1926 and raised in California. She graduated from the

Univer-sity of California at the end of World War II. It was in California that she met a

young Indonesian, Daroesman; the couple married and moved to Europe before

settling in Medan, North Sumatra. Here Ruth taught in a local high school for

several years, an experience that triggered her life-long interest in education in

Indonesia. Life was not easy in the troubled 1950s in Medan. Ruth was evacuated

from Indonesia in 1957, following a rebellion by regional army commanders in

Sumatra. She took her three young children to neighbouring Malaysia, where she

taught in a British Army school, completed a second degree at the University of

Malaya and worked at the university from 1962 to 1964 as a research assistant to

a UNESCO–International Association of Universities study of the role of higher

education institutions in Southeast Asian development. In the mid-1960s she

moved to Singapore, and from 1965 to 1967 was a research fellow and organising

secretary at the University of Singapore’s newly established Economics Research

Centre.

Ruth moved to Canberra in late 1967 to become a research oficer in the Depart

-ment of Economics of the then Research School of Paciic Studies (RSPacS) at

the ANU. She had special responsibility for the

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic

Studies

(

BIES

), a major activity of the department’s recently established research

program on Indonesia. Peter McCawley, a PhD student in the department at the

time, remembers the key role that Ruth played.

I irst met Ruth when I joined the Economics Department in RSPacS in early 1968. She was part of the Indonesia group, along with Heinz Arndt, David Penny, Panglaykim and other colleagues. Ruth, in her position as Assistant Editor, played

(3)

422 Anne Booth

a key role in supporting the work of the BIES. At that time the journal was less

than three years old, so it was not clear whether it could survive. It was still be-ing published in a rather informal locally printed version. Every issue, Heinz and

Ruth would be scrambling to ind copy. Heinz would encourage David Penny or Panglaykim to provide some notes for a draft article, and then both Heinz and Ruth

would edit the notes, often radically. This process usually led to heated internal

debates about the inal content. The production of each issue was therefore an excit -ing process.

Under the guidance of both Heinz and Ruth, the reputation of the BIES stead-ily increased across the academic community. International scholars working on the Indonesian economy visited the ANU from America and Europe, and prepared

articles for the journal. Soon the BIES began to be published in a new and more professional format, and the level of subscriptions steadily rose. By the time Heinz Arndt retired as editor, his and Ruth’s work had built the BIES into one of the key

journals on Southeast Asian economic affairs.

Ruth’s own research focused mainly on the economics of education. She visited

Indonesia on numerous occasions to carry out ieldwork, travelling out into towns and villages around provinces such as West Java to interview teachers and oficials about issues in the inancing of education. A number of these valuable studies were

published as articles in the BIES, others elsewhere.

For those of us who were young scholars starting out on a career in the study of Indonesia, Ruth was a wonderful mentor and friend. She would invite us for dinner to her home in the ANU apartments at Hughes, and then to the house she bought

in Yarralumla, where we would spend an evening with her and her children, Peggy, Suzanne and Perry, and a number of young Indonesian students studying at the

ANU. She was generous in many ways to all the scholars and young staff in the

Economics Department. When she spent an extended period on ieldwork in Indo -nesia in 1976, she kept open house in her apartment in Jakarta’s Kebayoran Baru. Even when she was out of town she was happy for colleagues from the Indonesia

Project [as the Indonesia group became known in later years] to camp in the spare

bedrooms. Chris Manning and I found it very helpful to be able to work from the Kebayoran apartment in 1976, when we were preparing the ‘Survey of recent devel-opments’ for the November issue that year. In this and in many other ways, Ruth’s

support underpinned the early work of the Indonesia Project and helped set the foundations for the success of the Project over the following decades.

Another student in the department in the 1970s was Howard Dick, who

remem-bers well Ruth’s sometimes radical approach to editing.

My irst contact with Ruth was over the publication in BIES of an updated ‘Survey of the Special Region of Yogyakarta’, which I had put together while working as a

research assistant for [Professor] Mubyarto at Gadjah Mada University [in Yogya

-karta] in 1972. I thought it was a good effort but Ruth’s best offer was a cutdown version, which I declined in a it of pique. Later she edited what became a twopart

article of mine on prahu (sail) shipping. This went more smoothly but had its mo-ments. I remember my dismay when she insisted that I cut out some columns of

igures. ‘Why are they in the table?’ ‘They are interesting.’ ‘But you don’t refer to

them in the text.’ I conceded reluctantly, but of course she was absolutely right. I also remember her at home in the front room at Yarralumla, sometimes host

to gatherings, sometimes with family, sometimes têteatête, the hours always illed

with conversation that covered many issues. I was always interested to hear of her

early and dificult years in Indonesia, living in the kampung in Medan, drawing

(4)

water from the well, a young white woman coping with her children in a very for-eign environment. Later there was much to talk about in her work around Asia on education. Every challenge was tackled with energy, enthusiasm and passion. What Ruth did really well was help other people, both professionally and personally. A remarkable woman, formidable (in the French sense of the word), and above all warm and generous. Ruth, thank you for everything.

Another student in the department, Chris Manning, remembers her work on a

number of regional surveys that were published over the 1970s.

She visited a number of provinces, including Bali, East Kalimantan and West Java, very different regions across the archipelago. Managing other regional surveys, which eventually covered almost every province in Indonesia, was one of Ruth’s

major contributions to the BIES. Ruth had close professional and personal rela-tionships with a generation of young scholars of Indonesia, several of whom later

worked with her in the Indonesia Project at the ANU. Many of them went on to

various posts in academia and public life, including Steven Grenville (later Deputy

Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia); Peter McCawley (later Deputy Director General of AusAID); Ross Garnaut (later economic adviser to former Prime Minis

-ter Bob Hawke, ambassador to China and adviser on climate change policy); Hal Hill; Howard Dick; Anne Booth; and Chris Manning. In the Department of Econom

-ics, she formed a remarkable editorial team with Professor Heinz Arndt. Dr R.M.

Sundrum, a professorial fellow in the department from 1970, was another close col-league, who had worked with Ruth at the University of Malaya in the 1960s.

Ruth’s caring approach to visitors from Indonesia was legendary. Dr Thee Kian

Wie, a researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, remembers her generous

assistance on his irst visit to Canberra.

Even before our irst visit in 1980, Ruth gave us a lot of information so that we

would not arrive unprepared in a strange city. She also invited us to her very cosy home in Yarralumla. We even had her special turkey on Thanksgiving Day. It was also very good to see her several times back in Jakarta, when she came for work. Immediately after our arrival for a second visit in 1982–83, she came to the house in Cook that we had rented from ANU. Ruth pampered us with warm clothes and food for my wife and baby son. We felt immediately at home and since then, every time we return to Canberra, it feels like our second hometown.

It was also Ruth who told us that, whenever you look back at Black Mountain as you are about to leave the city, you will come back, and so we did. Her words

became prophetic, because since our irst visit we have been back nine times and

have returned this year for the tenth time.

The last time we saw Ruth was in December 2004, when we visited her at her house in Melbourne. At that time she was still vigorous, and drove us to a restau-rant near her house for lunch. I offer to Ruth’s family our deepest sympathy for the loss of a loving mother, mother-in-law and grandmother. We ourselves will always remember Ruth as a generous, thoughtful and caring friend.

Ruth was seconded from the ANU in 1983 to a iveyear appointment with

the International Development Program (IDP) of Australian Universities and

Colleges. In this capacity she managed a fellowships program for students from

Southeast Asia and the Paciic, travelling extensively across the region. Ruth’s

(5)

424 Anne Booth

work at IDP formed part of her extensive contribution to the development of

education, particularly higher education, in Indonesia and the region. From the

mid1970s, well before she joined the ANU, until the late 1990s, well after she

retired, Ruth participated in an impressive list of research, planning and

capacity-building projects, many of them related to the inancing of education in Indo

-nesia. Both during her time at the ANU and after her retirement, she undertook

numerous consultancies with Australian government bodies and international

agencies, often working with Indonesian government departments. The tasks she

undertook included tracer studies of Indonesian school leavers (to link quality of

education with school inance) and of Indonesian recipients of Australian govern

-ment postgraduate scholarships; an investigation of central–regional inancing of

education; an evaluation of World Bank loans for education; and advice to the

Indonesian government on education planning.

When she inally withdrew from research and consultancy work, Ruth decided

to move to Melbourne, where both her daughters were living. She bought an

attractive house in Hawthorn and was a generous host to me on several occasions

when I was visiting from the UK. Her many friends were saddened when her

declining health forced her to sell the house and move to a care home, where I last

saw her in December 2011. She was then in frail health, but was clearly pleased to

see old friends from her Canberra days.

Ruth will be remembered by all who knew her as a warm host and generous

friend, whose affection for the people of Indonesia was deep and lasting.

Jakarta, September 2012

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS OF RUTH DAROESMAN

1992 Degrees of Success: A Tracer Study of Australian Government Sponsored Indonesian Fellow ships 1970–1989, Australian International Development Assistance Bureau

and International Development Program of Australian Universities and Colleges (with I.P. Daroesman).

1991 Indonesian Education and the World Bank: An Assessment of Two Decades of Lending, Operations Evaluation Department, World Bank Report 9752 (with D. Throsby and K.

Gannicott).

1991 ‘Staff development in Indonesian state universities’, in Indonesia Assessment 1991,

ed. H. Hill, Research School of Paciic and Asian Studies, ANU.

1991 ‘Indonesia: a comparative study’, National Ofice of Overseas Skills Recognition,

Department of Employment, Education and Training, and International

Develop-ment Program of Australian Universities and Colleges, Canberra (with I.P. Daroes -man).

1985 ‘Indonesia’, in Unemployment, Schooling, and Training in Developing Countries: Tanza-nia, Egypt, the Philippines and Indonesia, ed. M.D. Leonor, Croom Helm, London. 1982 ‘The role of newspaper advertisements in employment recruitment in Jakarta’,

Bul-letin of Indonesian Economic Studies 18 (3): 116–20 (with Anna Weidemann).

1982 ‘An economic survey of North Sumatra’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 18

(3): 52–83 (with Meneth Ginting).

1982 Financing Education, Development Administration Group, University of Birming-ham, and Ministry of Finance, Indonesia (with Douglas Lamb).

1981 ‘Survey of recent developments’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 17 (2): 1–41. 1981 ‘Vegetative elimination of alang-alang’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 17 (1):

83–107.

(6)

1981 ‘Central and regional responsibilities in the inancing of primary and secondary

schools’, Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta.

1979 ‘An economic survey of East Kalimantan’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 15

(3): 43–82.

1978 Alternative Educational Strategies and Their Financial Implications, Department of Edu-cation and Culture, Jakarta.

1976 ‘An economic survey of West Nusatenggara’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

12 (1): 44–69.

1975 ‘An analysis of the 1971 school statistics of Indonesia’, Department of Economics,

ANU.

1973 ‘An economic survey of Bali’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 9 (3): 28–61. 1972 ‘An economic survey of West Java’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 8 (2):

29–54.

1972 ‘Finance of education. Part II’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 8 (1): 32–68.

1971 ‘Finance of education. Part I’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 7 (3): 61–95.

1970 ‘Singapore sample household survey, 1966, Issue 2’, Economic Research Centre,

University of Singapore (with Poh Seng You).

1964 Education and Employment in Thailand, 1960: A Statistical Analysis of Census Data, UNESCO–IAU Study of the Role of Institutions of Higher Education in the

Devel-opment of Countries in SouthEast Asia, SouthEast Asian Research Ofice, Univer -sity of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur (with R.M. Sundrum).

1961 Joint UNESCO–IAU Study of Institutions of Higher Education in the Development of Countries in South-East Asia, SouthEast Asian Research Ofice, University of Malaya,

Kuala Lumpur (with R.M. Sundrum).