I have today attended the very well-attended ceremony to mark the passing away of Luise Anna Schwarzschild (LA Hercus) a few weeks ago—Luise's exemplary and important work on the grammar of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects spanned many decades until the mid- to late-1970s. Luise was a mainstay of the teaching of Sanskrit and Prakrits at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra for many decades; her quirky, engrossing and inspiring classes will be remembered by any who had the good fortune to sit in on them.

From the early 1960s onwards her research focus included an incredible amount ‘salvage-linguisitcs’ focused on the vanishing Aboriginal languages of Australia; she made many pioneering and exceptionally important contributions to both the recording of vestigal and threatened languages (including many hundreds of hours of reel-to-reel tapes done under difficult circumstances in remote desert and outback locations)—she published numerous grammars and translations (for more details the Wikipedia entry is helpful).