2025 PROGRAM
Bring Back Yesterday: In Conversation with Bob Carr
DATE:
Saturday 21 March, 2026
LOCATION:
Manly Youth Centre
COST:
$25.00
In this intimate conversation, Bob Carr reflects on love, loss, and the
emotional afterlife of a shared life. Bring Back Yesterday is his deeply personal account of a 50-year partnership, and of learning how to live in the wake of profound grief following the sudden death of his
wife, Helena, in 2023. Rather than offering consolation or easy answers, Carr speaks candidly about absence, memory, and how grief reshapes time, identity, and daily life. With characteristic clarity and restraint, he explores how love endures beyond loss, and what it means to keep going when the centre of one’s world has shifted. This is a quiet, searching conversation about devotion, resilience, and the hard work of remembering; a rare and moving portrait of grief told without sentimentality, and, ultimately, a story of enduring love. Content note: This session includes discussion of grief, loss and bereavement.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY
The Manly Writers' Festival acknowledges and thanks the original storytellers on the lands on which our events take place, the Gameraygal people of the Eora Nation. We acknowledge and respect their continuing connection and culture, and we pay our respects to ancestors and Elders, past and present, as well as emerging leaders.






