Luise Hercus

Luise Anna Hercus AM, née Schwarzschild, (born 16 January 1926) is a German-born linguist who has lived in Australia since 1954 and has specialised in Australian Aboriginal languages since 1963, when she took it up as a hobby. Works authored or co-authored by her are influential, and often among the primary resource materials on many languages of Australia.

Hercus was born Luise Anna Schwarzschild on 16 January 1926 in Munich, Germany, to the artist Alfred and his wife Theodora Schwarzschild. The family descended from a long line of rabbis, merchants and intellectuals. On the assumption of power by Hitler in Germany, as Jews, their position rapidly deteriorated, despite financial assistence from an uncle who had emigreated to the United States. With her family she took refuge in England in 1938, and the family settled in East Finchley, in northern London where she attended Tollington Hill School. The family, during the air raids over London, moved to Hampstead Gardens. She won a scholarship at 17 to St. Anne's College, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Oriental Studies in 1946, followed by an M.A.

In 1948 she was appointed tutor and lecturer at St. Anne's College, a position she held until 1954, when she emigrated to Australia. She married the scientist Graham Robertson Hercus, on 23 February 1955 (deceased 1974). Together they had one child, Iain Robertson Hercus, who obtained a doctorate in astronomy.

From 1965 to 1969 she was a Research fellow at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. It was at this time that she began to pursue private studies in aboriginal languages, managing to pull some from the brink of oblivion, as for example with Wangganguru which she recorded with the assistance of her informant, Mick McLean Irinjili. From 1969 she took up an appointment as Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Sanskrit, in the Asian Studies Department of the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Since 1991 she has been a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at ANU, writing up grammars, dictionaries and traditional texts, and continuing fieldwork mainly in the north of South Australia and adjacent areas of New South Wales and Queensland.

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