Author(s): Brett Hilder

New Biography

"I have a wife in Africa, far from her home in Hill End. My wife's name is Seble Mehari. She is a courageous woman and belongs to nobody but herself."In 2004 photographer Brett Hilder was travelling in Eritrea, where he met Ethiopian-born Seble Mehari living in a refugee camp. They fell in love and married, and Brett returned alone to Australia to organise the visa that would allow his wife to join him. And thus began years of enforced separation, with Seble, by now virtually stateless, fleeing twice more, to Sudan and then Egypt, as Brett struggled to obtain a visa to somewhere - anywhere - that would allow them a way and a place to be together. In dreamlike, impressionistic prose that shifts poetically between time, place and subject, Hilder captures the resonance of the distance between himself and Seble: distance in geography, in time, in culture, in status as a first and a third world citizen, in experience and age; distance that has failed to defeat their love affair.