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.

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.[1]

Teichelmann and Schürmann both enrolled in the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Society's seminary at Dresden (which later became the Leipzig Lutheran Mission[2]) in 1836. Both men obtained their ordination as Lutheran pastors in early 1838, and travelled to South Australia on the Pestonjee Bomanjee later that year, arriving in Adelaide on 12 October. One of their fellow passengers happened to be George Gawler who was there to take up his appointment as the new Governor of South Australia.[1]

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 Christianity 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.'[3]

Legacy

His 1844 dictionary of Barngarla has been used by the Barngarla community and Ghil'ad Zuckermann in the reclamation of the Barngarla language.[2]

Citations
  1. Kneebone 2005.
  2. Desiatnik, Shane (12 July 2018). "Ghil'ad's Indigenous language game changer". Retrieved 13 July 2018.
  3. Hill 2002, p. 524.

Sources

Further reading
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