Often new little magazines would start out through a perceived dissatisfaction with existing publications. The establishment of Heat in 1996 by Ivor Indyk was a case in point, and its history would demonstrate the pressures I have already alluded to with the established journals and the threat posed by the internet. According to Miriam Cosic, Indyk had been editing Southerly and ‘was tired of the dry academic tone of the literary magazines of the day, including Meanjin and Overland’ (9). He decided to make a statement: ‘I wanted something that was much more engaging and would gain a larger readership. I wanted to take literary writing out into the marketplace’ (qtd. in Cosic 9).

Cosic claimed that ‘multinational companies were beginning to dominate and they were looking for product: marketable, bestselling novels’, and that Indyk wanted to reintroduce the traditional role of the magazine by publishing new work by people before they went on to longer works, in the way that Carey, Moorhouse and Grenville had years before. He was fired up, in that his first editorial described ‘the destruction of universities as sites of intellectual and artistic controversy, [and] the devaluation of literary ideals in the marketplace’ (9). According to Ommundsen and Jacklin,

For a brief period the magazine did not publish, but the first series of fifteen issues began in 2001 with two issues a year, increasing to three in 2007, ending in 2011. It had contributors such as Roberto Bolaño, Brian Castro, Helen Garner, Gail Jones, David Malouf, Dorothy Porter, Charles Simic and Susan Sontag. Heat became an excellent serious literary magazine, with an emphasis on criticism and the blending of local and international authors, not unlike the ambitious Scripsi during the 1980s. Heat stood out from other Australian literary journals as it was international in outlook. The magazine certainly concentrated on publishing a number of ‘writer's writers’, to use the term.