Gabrielle Chan meets Brett Hilder
Published in Weekend Australian, May 22-23, 2004
picture by Erica Harrison

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A FOREWORD
("Another time past created")

Palimpsest.

This book is a travel diary, a day journal and a fairy tale. Almost a novel. A magical mystery tour illustrated by beautiful images from the past and the present. Full of music, history, geography, art, architecture and philosophy. Hope for the future, nostalgia for the past. People you wished you’d met. Some you have. New/old images you’ll never forget. Snaps that are works of art. Secret worlds, glimpsed before the door slams. All are full of love and longing. Sun & Shadow. Sol y Sombra.

For several years Brett wandered Sydney and the world carrying a series of handsome Bisonte notebooks, in which he recorded his life, day by day, image by image. They were more than diaries. Tan leather-bound works of art, appliquéd with photographs fixed by small perfect squares of masking tape, embroidered with quotations and written in ink by a careful, copperplate-cousin hand.

Brett is an artist, a dreamer, a thinker, a student, an idealist, a reader, a swimmer and a tireless walker. For someone who loves company, his life and his pursuits are mostly solitary.

Music infuses this book, pouring from the pages. After visiting D. H. Lawrence’s
grave in Taos, New Mexico, Brett clutches a Cuervo Gold and listens to
Segovia in the Adobe Bar, surrounded by Zapata’s men and photographs of
Lawrence. He samples an amazing variety of mescal in the Tazza café in Taos,
accompanied by guitar and piano. His hands are warmed by a cup of coffee as the Wichita Linesman plaintively calls on a snowy Santa Fe morning.

Fabulous images. In Taos, ochre yellow houses are iced with snow like Chinesepavilion wedding cakes. The surrounding black shapes of trees are thrown into sharp relief by mounded dumps of snow. Only Brett could see the radar domes of the White Sands missile range on the Chihuahua plain as ‘Moorish minarets’. The beautifully named Eritrean city of Asmara is coloured by public gardens and shrouded with diesel smog while a large hawk rides the blue urban air above the smog. Chocolate girls and creamy goats share a field. A shiny brass tap, supporting a rosy overgrown geranium stem, protrudes from a peeling white wall, the missing patches revealing the Madonna blue undercoat — suddenly decay looks like Delft. A pony trap full of children passes a white picket fence in an image pulled from a very old memory. An immense dormant fireplace is overwritten with words of love and loss.

Palimpsest.

Apart from beauty there is a lot of gentle humour. Young men adjusting their
beautiful girlfriend’s hair, their own is un-adjustable. In Cairo, ‘a fly joins me at
my table’.

This is travel most people never experience. Places many of us have only seen in photographs taken by rare soul-voyagers like Brett. In the end everything merges into a mix of wine, beauty, history, sex, love, humour, kindness, tradition, sadness, smoke, civility, music, night, coffee, women, compassion, foreign tongues and velvet stillness — no smells.

Brett’s travel is adventurous, frugal and brave. His writing is self-deprecating and fascinating. He understands his place in the world, travels light with very little money and writes from the heart.

The reader comes to realise how often and how long he has had to save his last
unexposed frame, waiting for the perfect shot to present itself. He never has film to waste.

The results speak for themselves.

My mother once described my elusive, wandering brother Ben as rather like
pouring a glass of water into your palm and being forced to watch as it disappears. She could have been describing Brett.

Lonely Planet should employ him.

Kate Fizpatrick