ISLAND LIFE

There’s a palpable sense of sadness and loss in rapper Promise Tekeste’s stance as he holds a treasured photo that shows him with his brother, who has been missing since 2016. The studio portrait of Promise and Nazwari Samson Woldemichael was taken as an afterthought about three years ago when Promise was compiling a press kit to promote his music.

“He was tagging along with me and we were super-happy,” says the Hobart musician, whose song Missing You is a tribute to his brother and has just been launched on Triple J to raise awareness about missing persons.

“I’d finished the shoot and I thought, ‘we don’t have any photographs together’ so I asked the photographer how much it would cost to get a couple more shots.”

Promise, who is shown here in Hobart’s Mathers Lane where his brother is being featured as part of a Missing Persons billboard campaign, did not get the photographs printed at the time, but he says he remembered them after his brother’s disappearance.

“I couldn’t remember where we’d had them taken and it took me another month or so to track the photography business down,” he says. “They found the photographs. It was so perfect.”

Nazwari was practising as an artist and studying at the time he was last seen at his North Hobart home in October 2016 at the age of 19.

“As time goes by, it gets harder,” Promise says. “When it’s raining outside, you wonder where he is and get that sick feeling in your stomach. There’s no hiding from [the grief].”