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TODAY marks two years since Bendigo man Daniel Rosewall vanished near Broken Hill.Intense land and air searches and a long-running media campaign followed, but Mr Rosewall is still missing.Nicole Ferrie spoke to Daniel's family in late 2010 and found a family holding onto hope that they would discover the truth.
DAVID Rosewall is black and white.
“Someone knows what’s happened to Daniel and they’re just not saying.
“They haven’t found a body, so… he’s still out there.’’
Daniel Rosewall was at work with his parents David and Julie on January 27 when he asked to borrow his mother’s car.
That was nothing out of the ordinary - he often used Julie’s car to run errands as it was the most accessible in the car park.
Dressed in shorts and business shoes he called in to see his girlfriend and said he would see her that night.
Six months later, he still hasn’t come home.
“He was here at work, went off to do something and never came back,’’ Julie said.
“Then we report it and within an hour or two of us reporting him missing we get a phone call back from police to say Dan was sighted in Kerang – he said he was having a few days out and then he would be home.
“We thought that’s okay, but then we were sitting down at home eating tea (two days later) and the phone rings and it’s Broken Hill police saying why is your car parked out in the middle of nowhere, blocking the road?
“I said ‘why don’t you know? He has been reported as a missing person’.
“Then even they were taken aback with that, so it took quite a few phone calls that night to actually get straight what was really happening and where we were going.’’
But nothing prepared the Rosewall family for the road they were about to take.
The red Mazda 3 Dan was driving had been abandoned on a stretch of road near Broken Hill, about 700km from Bendigo.
The car was out of petrol, and one witness said the keys were left on in the ignition.
The battery was also dead.
Dan’s wallet, baseball cap and a $50 note were on the front passenger seat.
There were few clues, with any evidence destroyed by the severe wind and dust storms that thrash the New South Wales outback.
“The connotation you had going up there was he’s driven up there in the middle of the night, taken a wrong turn, missed Broken Hill, run out of petrol, not unusual for Dan, and then wandered off,’’ David said.
“That was something you could handle.
“But it’s not what happened.’’
Dan had driven out the same road once before in the hours before he vanished.
He purchased two soft drinks in Silverton before returning to Broken Hill to withdraw money and then headed back out the same route.
“He knew where he was going and what he was doing,’’ David said.
“He’s gone out there in the daylight and then gone back into Broken Hill and gone back out again … but why would you drive out there with no petrol,’’ David said.
Dan had also passed signs to the nearby Eldee station, and the shearing sheds and windmill could be seen from the car.
An intense five-day air and foot search followed, with the support of Broken Hill locals overwhelming the Rosewall family.
They believe that if Dan had been in the area, he would have been found.
“But you had an awareness he wasn’t going to be found out there - and when they called it off, I think we felt it would have happened the day before,’’ David said.
“I’m pretty sure he’s not out there.’’
Leaving Broken Hill was difficult for David and Julie on many levels, particularly as they felt such a connection to the men and women who walked the red earth from dawn to dusk in searing heat searching for their son.
“That was very uplifting for us and very positive,’’ Julie said.
“But after that happens and you come back it’s pretty flat, because all the work is not hands on where you can see it.’’
But that was not the only challenge.
The Rosewall’s found themselves in a legal black hole, with no avenue available to manage Daniel‘s assets.
“Not only do we not know where Daniel is, or what’s happened, we can’t even deal with his things,’’ David said.
“Everywhere you went they’d tell you he’s 18, it’s not illegal to go missing – because of privacy there’s nothing we can do.’’
The Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Centre has made a submission to the Victorian Law Reform Commission Review of Victorian Guardianship Laws, seeking the right to allow David and Julie the legal means to deal with their son’s estate.
A decision is believed to be imminent.
But equally frustrating has been the fact Daniel is a missing person in New South Sales, and there is little support in Victoria.
“There seems to be a lack of process,‘’ David said.
In fact, there have been two reported sightings in Victoria but one took eight weeks to be ruled out as being Daniel.
The second report saw David and Julie visit a hostel in Melbourne after a month of waiting for the report to be investigated.
Sadly, the man was not their son.
“You can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat, but when you get clues it takes a long time for people to ring you back,’’ David said.
New South Wales Families and Friends of Missing Persons coordinator Liz Davies said many in David and Julie’s situation experienced similar frustrations.
“It’s an incredibly distressing experience,’’ she said.
“People don’t know where to turn and support services often don’t know how to help.
“They can feel very isolated.’’
Ms Davies said families often spoke of a wall of silence; a detachment and longing for the community to engage with them.
It’s something David and Julie can relate only too well to.
“I would get angry, because I would think it’s not even about me, and it’s not about you,’’ Julie said.
“If you just look at me and say I’m really sorry, or is there any news ... to know whether there’s any news.
“But then I thought just calm down because I’ve been guilty of that.
“Little things like that can get you angry really quickly.
“You’re just really going through a cycle – there’s some days when I go to the supermarket and I might see someone and think I’ll just duck the other way because I couldn’t handle if they said anything today – but you get better at it every day.
“You just learn to live with it – but there is a big hard knot in the tummy when you wake up every morning.
“It does take up a lot of your day.’’
In fact, it’s the every day things David and Julie miss most about Dan.
He was the office computer whiz and what took him five minutes now takes Julie half a day.
His belongings, including Dan’s beloved guitars, are still sitting in David and Julie’s home, but it’s too painful for his parents to take the next step and pack them away.
“Some days when you’re a little bit low and something like that has to be done, that can get you,’’ Julie said.
“We don’t get used to it, we just live with it and deal with it – it’s just what you have to do.
“I could stop at home and curl up in bed and cry all day every day, but that’s pointless to me and everybody else – it doesn’t help.“
As long as he knows he could just come back and he hasn’t done anything wrong."And if he did come back it would be just nice… it would take a lot of the pain away.‘’
****
HOPE hurts.
It’s living in the dark and desperately searching for light.
Like a shadow, it follows your every move… but dictates what happens next.
It creeps up when you’re not ready; reading the newspaper, watching television, or in the quiet moments when you’re trying to sleep.
It’s the knot in your stomach when you wake.
Julie Rosewall knows only too well how hope hurts. How it changes your life.
How hope makes you positive, but brings you unstuck just as easily.
“It takes up a lot of your day,’’ she says.
The weekends are the worst.
“On Saturdays no one was ever allowed to ring us before 10am because that was our sleep-in day, but we don’t sleep in quite the same anymore.
“Just sitting around, reading the paper and all that other stuff’s there… I can have bad Saturdays.’’
But it’s not just Saturdays. It’s every day.
Hope. That’s all Julie and her husband David have.
Hope, and all that comes with it.
They’re not seeking sympathy, just living in hope that one day their son will be found – or that someone will phone and let them know he is okay.
“It’s just shitty,’’ Julie says.
“My vocabulary has changed quite a lot recently, and not for the better.’’
Sometimes, there are no other words.
How else do you describe the pain of not knowing what happened to your son?
How do you tell others how you manage to get out of bed each day and soldier on?
Indeed, how do you do it?
But they do. Because of hope.
“I could stop at home and curl up in bed and cry all day every day, but that’s pointless to me and everybody else – it doesn’t help,’’ Julie says.
“So you just do the best you can all the time, really.’’
And you keep hoping.