Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann

Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann (7 June 1815 – 3 March 1893) was a Lutheran missionary who emigrated to Australia and did fundamental pioneering work, together with his colleague Christian Gottlieb Teichelmann, on recording some Australian languages in South Australia.

Schürmann belonged to the Dresden Lutheran Mission, succeeded by the Leipzig Lutheran Mission. His 1844 dictionary of Barngarla has been used by the Barngarla community and Ghil'ad Zuckermann in the reclamation of the Barngarla language.

Life

Schürmann was born in the village of Schledehausen, near Osnabrück, Germany, and was soon bereaved of his parents, his father dying a year after his birth, and his mother when he was eleven. His elder brother had enrolled in Johannes Jaenicke's Berliner Missionswerk or Mission school in Berlin, and Schürmann followed in his footsteps after completing his elementary education, enrolling there in July 1832.

Missionary work

Both Schürmann and Teichelmann believed that colonisation was a menace to Australian Aboriginal life and that to remedy its damaging impact, conversation had to be a two-way street, with due deference to the need to interact with native peoples in their own languages. Schürmann recounted that, while teaching the principles of Christian he would draw analogies between the circumstances of Christ's life and those of the dispossessed Aboriginal people:-

I told them that.. Jesus had been circumcised like the black men, had thought well, spoken and done well, then was hanged by his country people, but on the third day he went to heaven.'

Sources

• Amery, Rob; Gale, Mary-Anne (2014). "They came, they heard, they documented: the Dresden missionaries as lexicographers" (PDF). AustraLex. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hill, Barry (2002). Broken Song: T G H Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. Knopf-Random House. ISBN 1 74051 065 8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kneebone, Heide (2005). "Schürmann, Clamor Wilhelm (1815–1893)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Supplement. Melbourne University Press. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kuchel, Rachel (2014). "Lutheranism in South Australia —its origins and contributions to South Australian life" (PDF). South Australian Geographical Journal. 113: 57–75. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Teichelmann, Christian Gottlieb; Schürmann, Clamor Wilhelm (1840). Outlines of a grammar, vocabulary, and phraseology of the Aboriginal language of South Australia spoken by the native in and for some distance around Adelaide (PDF). Adelaide. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Further reading

• "Schürmann, Rev. Clamor Wilhelm (1815-1893)". German missionaries in Australia. Griffith University.