Would he remember his address, his full name and his parents’ names?

I think he would be ok.

But what if he was lost thousands of kilometres away?

Lost in Australia, he would still be ok. For a lost child is not the norm.

Now let’s put him in a country of 1.2 billion people, where homeless little ones roam the streets day in, day out. A lost kid is common place. 

 In this environment, could he find his way back to me?

Saroo Brierley was only five years old when he was separated from his older brother at a railway station somewhere in India.  

Months later he would find himself living in Hobart, adopted by a Tasmanian couple.

His journey from that railway station to the shores of Hobart was fraught with all the horrors you could imagine.  

How he survived at such a tender age on the overcrowded and impoverished streets of India is nothing less than a miracle.

Saroo has written book ‘The Long Journey Home’. With only the memories of a small child, he scoured just under one million square kilometres of India’s landscape looking for the railway station etched into his memory, in a town that’s name he had spent his life pronouncing incorrectly.

For five years he spent countless hours, days and nights using Google Earth to search for anything that would help him find his way home.

His story, and that of his families, has been turned into the much-anticipated movie ‘Lion’.

What Saroo had to do to find his first mother, sister and brother, is nothing short of gut-wrenching. 

There were many disappointments and lonely times knowing he was looking for a needle in a haystack.

He loved and adored his Tasmanian family, but part of him was incomplete. And that piece of the puzzle was somewhere on the other side of the world. He just had to find it.

The extraordinary lengths this man went to leave you breathless. As does his and his family’s courage to share this remarkable story with the world.

They shine a light on adoption in Australia which is plunging at a rapid rate due to the ridiculous amount of red tape the Federal Government insists on binding couples up in when all they want to do is love a child. 

Finding your way home isn’t always easy. And not all stories have happy endings. But this young man personifies the mantra of never quitting.  

And his Tasmanian family is an exceptional example of loving your child unconditionally.