Peter Holmes a Court walks in path of refugees

Bathed in the warmth of an African sun, Peter Holmes a Court is figuratively and literally a long way from his former life as a scion of the Holmes a Court business empire.

Speaking from his home in Nairobi this week, he contemplated that decision to leave his old life — in his own words, a “f...ing fortunate” life — which included, among other things, an NRL premiership as co-owner of the South Sydney Rabbitohs with Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe.

Then to now, the journey hasn’t always been easy, with protracted exits from significant corporate and personal relationships in Australia — the family business, the Rabbitohs and, likely hardest of all, a 24-year marriage that produced two sets of twins.

But perspective is a wondrous thing and Holmes a Court’s was irrevocably altered when he met his second wife, American conflict zone photographer Alissa Everett, a few years ago at a party in New York.

“I’ll keep it as polite as possible but I met her in an environment where I had recently been speaking to some people who were, erm, what’s another word for shallow,” he says.

Everett had experienced her own epiphany some years earlier, leaving a job at an investment bank in San Francisco and becoming a self-taught war correspondent, embedded with the US 101st Airborne Division in Iraq.

From that baptism of fire, Everett documented the human cost of war in some of the deadliest places on Earth, such as Dafur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in doing so started a career-defining examination of the global refugee crisis, or as Holmes a Court calls it, the “challenge of our time”.

“We’re all guilty of complaining about first-world problems but meeting Alissa and getting another way of looking at the world made it impossible not to engage in those issues for me,” Holmes a Court says.

For most people, engaging with hot-button issues such as the refugee crisis is confined to posts on social media but the high-profile businessman quickly realised he must do a lot more if he was to understand the woman he married.

And it’s fair to say his first attempt, carrying Everett’s camera bag on assignment in West Africa, was less than successful.

“I royally screwed up,” Holmes a Court recalls.

“Halfway through the first day, we’d been in a boat photographing — I think Alissa had been going for about 10 hours at that stage, from 6am to 4pm — and I hadn’t had lunch and little breakfast, and I was in the sun all day and started to lose it.

“I basically teamed up with the boat driver and we went home early and she didn’t get the shot she needed. Long story short, the first assignment was a disaster. The second one was equally bad but by the fifth or sixth I was starting to not make too much of an inconvenience of myself.”

With Holmes a Court learning on the job, the couple recently collaborated on a project called Seeking Refuge, which aims to expand our understanding of the refugee experience by showing that each story begins with a decision to leave a home and ends, best case scenario, with a new life in a community that often didn’t ask for asylum seekers.

Last year, it saw the pair travel with a family as they fled strife-torn South Sudan for the comparative safety of a Ugandan refugee camp.

Holmes a Court says the discourse around refugees often fails to fully appreciate how hard these displaced people try to stay where they originally were.

“The family had tried to stay in their village, they’d tried to survive, and they didn’t leave until one of their children had died of starvation, that’s how much they tried to hang on,” he says.

His father, Robert, a brilliant businessman who became Australia’s first billionaire, died when Peter was in his early 20s, leaving his mother, Janet, at the helm of Heytesbury, the family business.

As well as raising her four children, Janet, a science teacher by trade, changed the direction of the company and, in the process, became one of Australia’s richest women and one of WA’s most significant philanthropists and arts patrons.

Holmes a Court says he is staying with Mum this weekend, ahead of a speaking engagement for Save the Children at the University of WA on Monday.

But he wouldn’t be drawn on what his mother thought about his new line of work.

“I never put words in other people’s mouths, let alone my mother, who is one of the most eloquent people I’ve ever met – that would be dangerous.”

I get why people feel afraid. I get why people feel they’re being swamped, as one red-head in Australia said. And it doesn’t help the debate to discount that and it doesn’t help policy to belittle that.

Holmes a Court is unlike many refugee advocates in that he empathises with anti-refugee sentiment in countries where the spectre of immigration looms large.

As the unfulfilled promise of globalisation is replaced with a growing shift towards nationalism, and terrorism steels otherwise kind hearts against undocumented migration, some sections of society are feeling the impact more keenly than others.

“I get why people feel afraid. I get why people feel they’re being swamped, as one red-head in Australia said. And it doesn’t help the debate to discount that and it doesn’t help policy to belittle that,” Holmes a Court says.

On the topic of Australia’s most outspoken red-head, Pauline Hanson, Holmes a Court said he followed the recent State Election in WA closely but didn’t think One Nation’s poor showing was any indication that Australia was immune to the sort of nationalism that drove people to vote for Brexit and Donald Trump.

“Is One Nation more of an influence, are parties on the extreme, more of an influence in our politics today than they have been any other time in the last 50 years, and I think the answer to that is yes,” he said.

He said he’d love to take Hanson to South Sudan, where more teenage girls die in childbirth than graduate from high school, but he would equally like to take policymakers to small towns in England and Germany, where refugee intakes have impacted local populations.

“The solution is not to start with the problems we’ve got today, the policies we’ve got today, because then you’re only addressing the reality we’ve made,” he says.

“The solution is to start from a different point, the solution is to start from ‘What do we want from a society; how do we want our society to act; how do we want our society to come together’.

“Once our society gets a group vision on where it wants to go and how it wants to be, then the policies you put in place flow from that. But if you’re divided before you go in, on where you want to go, then it’s impossible to pick a path forward.”

The path Holmes a Court has picked for himself, entwined with that of his wife, is the one less travelled, especially by those of his rarefied pedigree.

It is the path of the refugee.

While he walks it by choice, this path is a last resort for many; a mortal necessity for those leaving their homes on the faint promise of a new life.

But, in capturing the experiences of people on this path, Holmes a Court and Everett invite us to journey beyond our preconceptions and prejudice.

And that’s not a bad first step.​