My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.

I wanted to be a plumber.

I never planned on being a plumber.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.