Saroo to share remarkable story in Geelong

THE remarkable true story of loss, determination, resilience and discovery that went from India to Tasmania and back again will be told in Geelong next month.

Saroo Brierley will be the keynote speaker at the first Foster a Future Breakfast, which will raise funds for Meli’s foster care program and highlight the need for more carers in the Geelong region.

Mr Brierley was accidentally separated from his biological family in India at the age of five, adopted out of India by a Tasmanian couple, and reunited with his original family 25 years later after finding his hometown via Google Earth.

His 2013 autobiography A Long Way Home has sold more than a million copies and was adapted into the 2016 Oscar-nominated film Lion.

Speaking from his home in Tasmania on Tuesday this week, Mr Brierley said it was a juxtaposition for him seeing Lion today.

“Here is today, and you see [the film] on the big screen or at home and you get taken away to the times where you were in the past.

“It really touches you and you think ‘I’m really lucky to be here in Australia because I don’t know long I would have survived in the environment and circumstances that I was in’.

“Call it serendipity, call it fortune; I don’t know.”

He said his relationship to Lion had changed considerably since he had become a parent.

“It affects me more now, it makes me so much more sensitive.

“When people were watching the movie, they were saying to me ‘I can’t imagine how you went through all those nooks and crannies, the trials and tribulations and the sorrows of living on the streets, because as a mother or a father, I just can’t imagine it’.

“And now being a father myself, I totally understand what they were talking about.”

The Foster a Future Breakfast will be held at GMHBA Stadium on September 7 from 6.45am.

Head to meli.org.au/fosterafuture