The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

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.

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

But what reality was ever made by realists?