Bruce Fairfax was a “wilderness man, a traveller, a loving dad and husband, who inspired thousands of students to be better people”.
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He spent his life exploring the outdoors, until one day he vanished without a trace while on a walk in the rainforest west of Dover in southern Tasmania.
The 66-year-old disappeared in October last year, but his devastated wife Louise Fairfax is still struggling to embrace the reality and finality of his disappearance.
A last minute decision by Bruce to join Louise on the trek down south led to the couple walking on the Duckhole Lake track, where it is believed he wandered off.
When Bruce failed to turn up at the carpark after their separate walks, Louise said she was only “mildly worried”.
“He’s an independent spirit. I wasn’t worried about him,” she said this week.
“He was constantly late or just slightly mislaid so I just didn’t think too much of it.
“Others pointed out that if he was actually lost, we needed to alert SES now so we could find him before nightfall, and they were, of course, right.
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“Even when they didn't find him by the end of the day I was only mildly worried because he’d only been lost for a couple of hours. We spent a significant portion of our life in the bush … I’ve had nights out in the bush unexpected. You know, it’s not a huge drama.”
The search party expanded with more than 120 people in the next two days, including police, SES, the orienteering community, members of the Launceston and Hobart walking clubs and Pandani bushwalking club, Launceston Church Grammar staff as well as present and past students, community volunteers, Fairfax family members and friends as well as Bruce and Louise’s dog.
“That first night, in the dark and for as long as I could manage, I just walked all of the roads that I could possibly walk, singing to him, hoping that my voice would carry and that if he was lying there he could hear that I was singing to him, and that he would know that we hadn’t just given up or gone away,” Louise recalled.
It was when she spoke with the searchers who had been flying the rescue helicopter over the area that Louise was confronted with a devastating reality.
“They were searching for warmth, but I was the only warmth they were finding,” she said.
“In the night I was just howling and howling … I had kind of given up, but next morning, the police kept giving me hope. They kept feeding little hope tablets.”
As soon as the morning hit, Louise called her children.
“We can only assume he wandered for whatever reason, off the track and then we don't know, maybe he had a heart attack or maybe he fell or maybe he fell and then had a heart attack.
“Or maybe he just fell and got hypothermia, because even though I had rugged him up beautifully, with Parkinson's they lose their shiver response.
“The police told me that that's a very nice way to go apparently, they said at first you're cold, but then you’re sleepy and then you warm up … there's a sort of pleasant floatiness about it and if that’s the way Brucey left us, that’s a very nice ending … in the most beautiful place.”
Driving back to Launceston with her daughter, Louise said she experienced a wave of emotions.
”They say there are several stages of grief.
“At first it was just denial. Even holding his memorial service it was this drama, this play we were going through because one was required to do it.
“It was just too inconceivable, too random.”
It has been five months since his disappearance, but there has been no news.
That lack of closure has a silver lining though, Louise said.
“Bruce has always been a part of our lives and in a sense, the lack of closure gives us more space to keep it like that. We haven’t had to be faced with a dead body and all its grizzly finality; we can just think of him as ‘disappeared’, and that’s how we mostly refer to him. After all, he’s not officially dead yet. There is no death certificate.
“We’re not denying that he’s gone – it’s just a different way of thinking about the whole thing.”
Before he vanished, Bruce endured a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
From the moment he was diagnosed, Louise faced her own struggle – losing the love of her life.
“I was going through the stages of grief, even when he was still alive,” she said.
But that’s not the man Louise wants to remember. She instead remembers the man she married and spent nearly 50 years with.
The man she calls her “lion”, who had “magic in his eyes”.
“The minute Bruce disappeared from us, he returned to being the lion of his youth, he returned to being an Aslan figure, the minute I didn’t have to look Parkinson’s in the eye,” she said.
“I had feared the only Bruce I would remember was that frail Parkinson’s Bruce. A positive side of all this is that it’s been lovely to be able to return to the Bruce that was there for most of my life.
“The other day, I found a picture of Parkinson’s Bruce … I just looked at it and burst out howling. I’m gonna burn it actually … you can see he’s lost his lion status. He looks apprehensive, a little anxious. That’s not the real Bruce.
“It's not how I want to remember my husband, he was vibrant, lively, intelligent, warm and caring. He was not those things that Parkinson’s did to him.”
While some will remember Bruce for his role as a teacher, Louise said there was “so much more” to him than his career.
“He was a family man, utterly dedicated to his family.
“At his memorial, it was all ‘I loved Bruce because he truly listened, because he inspired me to be a better person, because he gave me faith in myself and because he inspired me to become who I am today’.”
Having spent most of his life out in the bush, swimming in wild waters and travelling across the world, Bruce fought Parkinson’s until the very end.
From staying in mountain huts in New Zealand with his children to walking tracks in Slovenia and climbing summits in England, and walking in the Swiss and French Alps, he never let his physical or mental struggles get in the way of a good adventure.
In the last few months of his life, he was overcome with anxiety, but that didn’t stop him from packing his bag and heading on his last trip with Louise.
“He fought his disease until the end,” she said.
“He’s a soldier who went down fighting.”
Melissa Mobbs
A journalist with more than a decade of experience, Melissa Mobbs currently works as the Deputy Editor for The Examiner Newspaper in Launceston, and has a strong background in reporting on crime and the justice system. Send tips to Melissa.Mobbs@examiner.com.au or on Twitter via @melissamobbs.
A journalist with more than a decade of experience, Melissa Mobbs currently works as the Deputy Editor for The Examiner Newspaper in Launceston, and has a strong background in reporting on crime and the justice system. Send tips to Melissa.Mobbs@examiner.com.au or on Twitter via @melissamobbs.
