Born: 16 January 1926, Germany
Died: 15 April 2018
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Luise Anna Schwarzschild
This biography has been shared from The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Luise Hercus was an ethnologist and linguist who was renowned for her efforts to record the ancestral languages and songs of Aboriginal people. Armed with a tape recorder and little funding, she sought out those with knowledge of indigenous languages. With patience and sympathy, and an evident interest in their personal stories, she encouraged the Aboriginal people she met to commit what they remembered to tape. Starting in Victoria in the 1960s, Hercus later extended her work into neighbouring states and Central Australia. Her first major work in over 100 publications was The languages of Victoria: a late survey (1969). She lodged with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies over 1,000 hours of recordings in over 56 languages and dialects. Hercus also had a distinguished career as a linguist of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects, and published a significant body of work under her maiden name.
Chronology
1946
Education – Bachelor of Arts (BA), University of Oxford
1948
Education – Master of Arts (MA), University of Oxford
1948
Career position – Fellow, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
1948 – 1954
Career position – Lecturer in French Philology, University of Oxford
1954
Life event – Settled in Australia
1965 – 1969
Career position – Research Fellow, University of Adelaide
1969 – 1991
Career position – Senior Lecturer (later Reader) in Sanskrit, Department of South Asian and Buddhist Studies, Australian National University
1978 – 2018
Award – Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA)
1991 –
Career position – Visiting Fellow, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Australian National University
1995
Award – Member of the Order of Australia (AM) – for service to education and linguistics particularly through the preservation of Aboriginal languages and culture
1 Jan 2001
Award – Centenary Medal – for service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of linguistics and philology