Cirrus@Austlit

'It's not the humidity, it's the heat. Keep your furnaces and hell-hinges and Adelaide in December. You wish to know true, suffocating, dehydrating lip-chapping cookery? Go to the establishment formerly known as the Tattersall's Hobart Aquatic Centre in winter. Wear trousers and a cardigan because the outside temperature is hovering between six and nothing degrees Celcius. Stroll in like an executive, dressed like this - a manner you thought sensible - a you will know warmth, writ large and equatorially cloying, if the equator depended on trench-warfare quantities of chlorine to stay clean, Yo will struggle through the conversation with the girls at the front desk without fainting, then run into a guy you went to high school with as you pass the lifeguard station. He is jovial, and apparently unaffected by the appalling heat.' (Introduction)