The sea of chance

As much travel memoir as autobiography, this is poetic story of Australian photographer Brett Hidler and his fight with bureaucracy and prejudice to reuinte with his Eritrean wife Sibella Mehari.

In 2003, in Asmara, Eritrea, Australian photographer and inveterate traveller Brett Hilder met and fell in love with Sibella Mehari. Born in Ethiopia, she and her family had been deported because of their Eritrean heritage and now lived as refugees in an alien 'homeland'. Following their marriage in Asmara a year later, Brett returned alone to Australia to organise the visa that would allow his wife to join him, unaware of the years of separation and struggle that lay before them. As Brett continued to fight bureaucracy and prejudice to obtain a visa to a place - any place - where they could be together, Sibella, effectively stateless, fled from Brett Hilder Eritrea to Sudan and then to Egypt. In this poetic work, as much travel memoir as autobiography, Brett captures the resonance of the distance in time, geography and personal freedom that separates them; his life as part of the First World so different from Sibella's life 'between the world of lost dreams, and the world of a refugee'.