2025 PROGRAM
Festival Conversation and Book Launch: Home, Forever
DATE:
Sunday 22 March, 2026
LOCATION:
Manly Youth Centre
COST:
$0.00
Home, Forever is the story of a family shaped by love, commitment and an extraordinary sense of responsibility which extends beyond borders. In this Festival Conversation and Book Launch (via Saul Eslake), Anna Dombkins speaks with Caroline Baum
about her family’s adoption journey and the life-changing work they undertook in Tanzania. What began as a values-based, personal decision grew into long-term engagement with communities facing profound disadvantage, leading to the creation of a charity focused on care, education and dignity. This conversation explores what it means to build family in unexpected ways, to confront ethical complexity with humility, and to translate compassion into sustained action. It is a story of belonging — not just within a household,
but across cultures and continents — and of choosing to stay engaged long after the hardest decisions have been made. A thoughtful and generous Festival Conversation marking the launch of Home, Forever. This is a FREE Festival event. Donations to 'Forever Projects' are welcome.
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.