Cactus Pear For My Beloved
Samah Sabawi
Don’t miss Samah at the BMI on Wednesday 5 November at 7.17pm.
Samah will be in conversation with author Fatima Measham
This is a FREE community event brought to you by the Stella Prize as Stella Day Out Ballarat.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza
The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.
Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands.
Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.
One of the gifts of Samah Sabawi’s Baba is to remain open-hearted and optimistic.



Our library stands on Wadawurrung Country. Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute acknowledges the Wadawurrung People of the Kulin Nation as the first inhabitants and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we work, learn and create. Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.