I am reminded standing here of my cousin, Arthur “Mad Dog” Kemp, a professional boxer of falling note in the late 1960s, who featured occasionally on the Golden Gloves TV show, and who was once described by the old Melbourne Sun as “having taken the once noble art to a new all-time low.”
In truth, the bottle was already winning with Arthur and he took to spending much of his life in the park in Fitzroy with the multi-hued humanity that drank and slept there, including those Aborigines who looked after him.
Some years passed and in 1972 Muhammad Ali flew into Australia. The first thing he said to the crowded press conference at Tullamarine was, “Where are the black people?”
There was stunned silence, but within a short time Ali's limo was speeding its way to Fitzroy followed by a motorcade of media.
It stopped at the park and Ali made his way across to where Mad Dog Kemp was drinking with a group of blackfellas. Mad Dog still retained something of the old pugilist spirit and, recognizing the figure advancing toward them, leapt to his feet, walked over to Ali, and said, “You're not the greatest, I am.”
“No,” said Ali. “You're just the ugliest.”
Now I had intended to talk to you today about love stories. But at the end of this most marvellous week for Australian writing that began with Christos Tsiolkas winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has continued with this wonderful festival, it would be wrong of me to not talk about the attack that is presently being mounted on Australian writing.
Mad Dog Kemp was part of a sport in which boxers were expected to take falls and lose fights in order to benefit rich promoters. And at the moment, Australian writers and readers are being asked to take a fall in order that a few rich people get richer. I don't think we should be taking that fall, and tonight I want to talk about what strikes me as the rotten and stinking deal that is being proposed to us.
And so I'd like to begin with the word – if not quite at the beginning, then in the late fourth century AD, when St. Jerome translated the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament into Latin. For the next thousand years, St. Jerome's version, which became known as the Vulgate Bible, was the book.
I cannot begin to convey to you the destructive stupidity of what is being proposed
But as Latin became not so much a lingua franca as a language of exclusion and privilege – a form of power, in other words – the battle to know the great truth of that age in your own tongue – to hear the stories that mattered most in your own language and idiom – became inextricably bound up with the battle for freedom of thought and for freedom itself.
For good reason the Inquisitors' first question of a suspected “heretic” was always whether he knew any part of the Bible in his own tongue.
This battle begins in earnest with the birth of the printed word and the desire – punished throughout Europe by hideous death – to read the book, the Bible, not in Latin, the dead tongue of the old imperium, but in the tongue of the field and town, the languages of the people: German, Dutch, French, Spanish.
In our language, this battle's greatest landmark is the publication in 1525 of William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible.
Though there had been English translations before, Tyndale, under the influence of Erasmus of Rotterdam, was the first to base his work not on corrupted Latin glosses, but return to the Hebrew and Greek originals, coupling his linguistic and literary gifts to a profound humanism.
“If God spares my life,” Tyndale said, “I will cause the boy that drives the plow in England to know more of the Scriptures than the Pope himself!”
