Your basket is empty.

HEAT 1. Fire & Shadow

254 pages
Paperback, 22.3 x 17 cm
Published 2001
ISBN 957831110
ISSN 1326-1460

Editor

Ivor Indyk

Designer

Harry Williamson

HEAT 1. Fire & Shadow

Contents

Prose

Beverley Farmer – Mouths of Gold
Gustaf Sobin – Basso Continuo
Alexis Wright – A Kind People
Eva Sallis – The Kangaroo
Louis Nowra – Chihuahuas, Women and Me
Suneeta Peres da Costa – Dreamless
Kerryn Goldsworthy – Almost an Island
David Malouf – The South
Peter Holbrook – Poetry and Sadness
John Dale – On Smoking
Marion Campbell – Goodness Itself
Dorothy Johnston – A Script with No Words
Alexandra Pitsis – The Terrain of his Eternal Amnesia

Literary Engagements

Gig Ryan – On Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Eden Lidelow – An Interview with Susan Sontag
Christopher Pollnitz – Criticism, Biography and Les Murray
Fay Zwicky – On Rosemary Dobson
Andrew Dowling – On Peter Carey

Poetry

Robert Gray, Antigone Kefala, Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, John Foulcher, Peter Boyle, Kate Camp, Michael Farrell, Emma Lew, Peter Rose

Art

Noel McKenna – Dog Posters
Jacqueline Rose – Josephine’s Song

Related Content

The finale was majestical. Dearo, dearie, the explosion was holy in its glory. All of it was gone. The whole mine, pride of the banana state, ended up looking like a big panorama of burnt chop suey. On a grand scale of course because our country is a very big story. Wonderment was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor, and the earth shook the bodies of those ones laying flat on the ground in the hills. Then, it was dark with smoke and dust and everything turned silent for a long time.

The kangaroo suddenly stood up, shaking the car heavily as it rose. It stood a good two metres above the bonnet and leered through a bloody eye at them, bleeding mouth open, showing enormous yellow rat teeth. Samir, Amin, Ilham and Zeen screamed and slammed back rigid in their seats. The kangaroo raised its fists and began beating wildly at the bonnet. They could feel it kicking and tearing at the radiator.

She had eyes as black and shiny as fresh grapes. Her head was shaped like an apple and her ears were shaped like a bat’s. She was so small that she could fit into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. She was Ren, my black and tan chihuahua.

Some come down from the mountains / into the searing belly of the wind, / and sit between six fires, then turn, / already blind, towards a seventh fire, / the sun.

When we inscribed our addresses on the flyleaves of our schoolbooks, did we write down our exact, elaborate locations in infinite space in order to reassure and steady ourselves? Or was it the expression of a childhood confidence, now long lost, that we knew exactly where we were?

Now, when I ask if you can hear the waves, you turn / and point to the dunes before moving towards them, / dressed for the cold in a swagger that would be / at home on deck, on a solo cruise, in big water. / I have used the voice of a teaching man too often.

and I found myself / drifting from thoughts / of a troubled heart / into what his first sentence / would sound like, what / it might contain

something announced itself and set snares behind my eyes – / something formal and free, / troubling and instructive.

No matter how much my father had drunk, he never muffed a line when reciting Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’.

Staring down at a bend in the road, I realised what I missed most about smoking – it wasn’t the kick as your lungs filled with nicotine, or the wisps of blue smoke trailing after your fingers, or even the taste – it was the way you could stand and stare at a bush, a rock, or nothing at all, and get lost in the moment.

Then it’s the punch, / the muscle of currents. As I listen / to that thumping, my body // shakes, the tent shivers

Goodness had no boundaries. Goodness was blindly devoted; Goodness let herself be walked all over by others; Goodness always came away from the P and C meetings finding that she’d become the fund-raiser, the secretary, the fete coordinator.

Their blessing is a wafer I will take and break in half – / the small mouths of the fish beginning slowly to open.

Every evening the man brings home his trailer / of vegetables. He bruises them rushing over the kerb. // In the house across the way a mirror waits / glowing and alone for all the lighted day.

and all the instruments that need to go / into the autoclave have gone to that chamber / of steam and all the debris is whirlpooled / down I am set free in the streets / victim and champion / red and rubbed lips softer than anything else

any poem can be a diminishing thing / taken from the sea & standing in for you & / a remedy we eat what they eat but thats not / reality the spoon falls in the phone rings

My mind was like an angel sinking. / Among the ruins of four walls you showed me the sea – / how it and the starry sky were constructed. / It was ebbtide. I undressed. / How many hearses in the coming year?

The classic struggle: of course the writer is alone. It’s voluntary house arrest. Cocteau said you can never be alone enough – his fantasy being some basement where people would leave the food outside the door.

If he closed his eyes momentarily, she reminded him of the lizards that ran briskly through the houses near the sea, in those humid afternoons of endless play and mystery, into the night and unaffected sleep. Instead of giving over to this, he used the words that made things tidy and distanced him from the past. This was a form of illusory control over his life. We create and depend on the tools that keep us standing up.

Whose inked spurs to the dialectic / snaking down the rancid page – / yours? mine? a third’s? / Those epigrams were dying on a lip: / were they mine you edified, undid?

Somewhere, I suppose, a waking / is celebrated, wine poured, / assurances exchanged.

Below, the land is quilted / like a chequered past, / cosmetic, infinitely private. / The in-flight service is delayed / and I am glad, but not the Americans. / Just as the captain predicts / a smooth flight we hit the turbulence.

Maintaining critical distance when writing literary criticism is not a matter of principle with me; I can’t conceive of doing it another way. It seems from his preface that Alexander both personally admires and is daunted by Murray, but that what he was principally afraid of was Murray withdrawing the right to quote him. In his anxiety to please and his fear of not being allowed to publish, Alexander has produced a portrait that has this reader, for one, shivering with repudiation.

Anchored in a sense of the present’s dependence on the past, her best work has been characterised by exemplary clarity, restraint and tact. Predominantly elegiac in tone, mood shifts have rarely jolted her meditative, unpressured pace. Qualities I once described in a 1985 essay on her work as ‘reclusive grace’, distinctly unmodern in her considerate refusal to invade, ‘wanting the light and sorry for the dark.’

The plot is simple, but the narration of the novel is remarkable. Carey’s prose recreates the style of a man with little formal schooling and it foregoes many standard grammatical features, such as commas. The effect is impressive. Thoughts and actions are yoked together in a single sentence so as to create a tremendous sense of narrative urgency. Every sentence has so much material squeezed into it that it seems ready to burst apart at the seams.

Here and there all over Europe the ruins of graves left over from the Stone Age lie in the long grass or snow. On a day between winter and spring, after the thaw, in a meadow like matted tobacco from the months under snow, I came across two such graves in a mound inside a ring of rocks overlooking a bright sea. In the belly of the mound they were two gashes lipped with stones and lined with splintering snow, and in the shadow of the tall rocks were huddled clumps and shreds, the only snow in sight, as if where stone was, winter still was.

Josephine’s Song

It is the intensity with which she performs her squeaking which sets her apart – she does what all mice do, and yet by making a theatrical performance out of the mundane, thoughtless act of squeaking, she raises it into an art.

Noel McKenna’s series of Dog Posters appear as graphics throughout HEAT Series 2 Number 1.

Looking backwards, we could only be searching for ourselves. Straying through the ruins and debris of past civilisations, we could only be hoping for glimpses – no matter how tenuous – of our long forgotten identities.

Back from a sea sweaty with stars, or from one black and flowing like crepe. / From a sea that erupts / and falls on them so hugely that only the radio mast could have shown / in the foam, if they’d had one. The fishermen have been taught, / by each other, that if swept off / in such a sea, without a jacket, which they don’t wear in their work, / to swim straight down and make an end of it, / since they will never get back.

On a soft, sunlit morning in March 1959, just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I stood at the rails of an Italian liner, the Fairsky, and after a five-weeks sea-voyage that had taken me via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Aden and Port Said, saw the Bay of Naples open before me, and utterly familiar in the distance the dark slopes and scooped-out cone of Vesuvius – all just as I had always imaged it, like the breaking of a dream.

Several years ago, a group of Canberra sex-workers applied to the Australia Council and were granted $6,280 to write a film script. The organization WISE (Workers In Sex Employment) was involved. A local writer ran some workshops, characters were developed, a plot outlined. But the project caused a stir, and resulted in a good deal of bad publicity, most of which used the argument that funding prostitutes to write a film script was a waste of public money.

When I met Pramoedya, whose work I had admired for fifteen years, in Jakarta in March 1998, two months before the overthrow of Soeharto’s thirty-two-year rule, he was as I had imagined: unassuming, nervous, fearless.

My whole life, I had woken in earnest and with an uncanny conceit about my place in the world. In the world, if people were distinguished by their night and morning sensibilities, I would be a ‘morning person’, by which I mean that I rarely hesitated about the importance of getting out of bed.