HEAT | Australia’s International Literary Magazine

HEAT Series 3 Number 13

Our new issue features writing by Beverley Farmer, Anna Poletti, Marianne Larsen (trans. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell), James Salvius Cheng, Michael Farrell and Tom Carment. Subscribe to HEAT now to receive Number 13 as your first issue, with more adventurous literary writing and art from Australia and around the world to come.

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New to the archive

It is autumn when László sends his introductory message on the dating app. Seasonal is gripping on to their job while their life falls apart in a foreign country. They are not sure that talking to the world in this state is a good idea, but they don’t know what else to do while they are in free fall. They try to trust that this breaking apart is also a coming together.

Australian voices remind Kate of dead people. The people she loved as a child, who loved sun and ciggies. More than life itself, as it turned out. A large cup of syrupy black coffee was on the bench table. Her left hand was bunched in a fist to conceal a dozen or so almonds. She pinched out a couple with the fingers of her right hand and passed them to her mouth, crunched and chewed, and took a drink.

One of the four bedrooms of each of the display homes would be furnished with an imaginary white Australian boy in mind. The room would most often be arranged to suit the taste of a sporting boy, with posters of the Chappell brothers dressed in World Series Cricket uniforms taped to the wall, Little Athletics ribbons pinned to the pinboard and empty Clarks’ running shoe boxes under the bed.

Jola and Mirek are generous, hospitable, and the only remotely bourgeois people we will meet for the entire two months we are in Poland. After a forty-hour journey from Australia, a sumptuous meal and wine, the talk flowed, and I learnt my most enduring lessons about Poland. The Jewish question is vexed. The Polish Pope Jan Paweł II is sacrosanct; by extension the current German Pope Benedict XVI is highly regarded. And, as Mirek said, I have gay friends, but I do not want it rubbed in my face.

‘David’s book of poems, Bicycle, was soon to appear, and the publishers had requested a suitable “author” photograph. So, in the summer of January 1970, we wandered rather shyly through the University of Sydney’s semi-deserted grounds, looking for places and light that would lend themselves to portraiture. We have been friends ever since.’ – Sally McInerney

We have all heard of Prometheus, great rebel against the gods and bringer to earth of a commodity, fire, which we have depended on from earliest times for much of what makes us human: campfires, cooked meat, the forging of iron into ploughshares, horseshoes, swords. What is not so well known is that Prometheus had a brother, also a titan and demi-god, but as his name suggests quite opposite in nature and habit of thought.

The Greek commanders, Nestor, Agamemnon and the rest, could do nothing but wait, unheroically, for the cloud to lift from their champion’s brow. Till it did, they dared not move.

Da Ponte, dear friend and collaborator, finder of words for me, this is the letter I shall never write and have always been addressing to you, my side of a conversation that has been in progress since we first began, always faintly to be heard under the music I found to fit your words, or rather, in the gap, which is not always silence, where words and music fail, and must always fail, to connnect; in our case an attempt to move between Italy and our more sober North as if there were no Alps to cross.

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HEAT is eclectic and eccentric, bold and often feisty, and above all else, it is a journal that always gives a freer rein to its writers, that we might gallop wherever we will.
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HEAT magazine was a trailblazer from the day it was launched…[it] has always been known for the quality of its writing as well as its multicultural outlook.
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HEAT Series 3 Number 13

New to the archive

The New Violence

Marrickville Light

Dusk and The Public

Meal Tickets

David Malouf at 90

Epimetheus, or The Spirit of Reflection

Ulysses, or the Scent of the Fox

Mozart to da Ponte

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