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News of Tim’s death spread quickly among his mates, but no one was sure of the cause. Was it a drug overdose or a night out gone wrong? Many had only seen his death notice in the paper, or a note pinned to the board of a drop-in centre in Hobart. Others had just heard from friends. Only Tim knew the truth. He wasn’t dead at all.
Tim has died once of a drug overdose, once of suicide and once of (suspected) murder. At least that’s what his friends have thought. Louise, his partner of eight years, is getting used to the rumours of his demise. “You just don’t take any notice after a while,” she says.
Tim’s face is sun worn and roughly shaved. HIs hair is wild and curly and features the occasional dreadlock but he keeps it tied back as neatly as he can. A strong chin and cheekbones combine with a welcoming, cheeky smile to make him quite an attractive man.
He’s not big, but you imagine he could more than hold his own in a fight if required. Fading tattoos run down his arms, which are muscled from years working as a roadie and labourer.
“I left home when I was about 14,” he says. This was just over a year after he moved to Hobart from Queensland. His parent’s work involved trips to Antarctica, so they moved their family to Fern Tree, a quiet, forested suburb half-way up Mount Wellington in Hobart’s west.
It was soon after the move that he got the nickname that was to stay with him for life. His older brother had been called Bullwinkle, and from that "I got stung with Rocky”.
He met Darren on the bus to school from Fern Tree. “My parents owned the Fern Tree pub,” says Darren. He saw in Tim “a like minded individual”. “We were both, well I wouldn’t say troublemakers...”
Despite making new friends such as Darren, Tim was resentful that his parents’ moved him away from his Queensland mates. He thought his parents were too focussed on their jobs and new lifestyle and not focussed enough on their family. He left home. He says he “grew up a little bit on the streets and knew most of the people around town.”
He attempted to keep himself in school, with varying success. “I was also just living those rebellious sort of days,” he says. “Nobody had control over me and I knew in my heart that it was only up to me whether I did or i didn't [go to school].” He worked before and after school at a cafe, but says it wasn’t necessarily just to fund his education.”I wasn't doing it sometimes for my books and my schoolbag but for a packet of cigarettes and a cask of wine.”
He and his friends from the streets would go to the now closed Salvation Army Roadhouse for breakfast. There was a notice board there where people would put up notes mourning the death of friends. Several year’s later, he says, when his own death was rumoured, “thats where my name was put up”.
After nearly two years living the life of a runaway teenager, Tim attempted suicide.
“Did the silly thing of finding a rusty old cut-throat knife.” He’d been told by friends how to properly slit his wrists, “and i did it, lo and behold my whole wrist just openned up and I thought ‘well you've done it this time Tim’. I just walked up the hallway and went to bed not knowing whether I'd wake up or not.” A friend found him and he was rushed to hospital.
The expereince was the beginning of a change in his attitude towards suicide. “I've pretty much been against it since [i was]17,” he says. The smile drops from his face as he stares into the distance. “And then people started, yeah, dropping like flies.”
Tim says there are very few people he knew on the streets who have made it into their 30’s.
“In my younger days a lot of my friends all commited suicide basically and yeah there's only a handful of us left around from when I was knocking around on the street that are still alive,” he says. “A lot have left wives or even wives have left husbands with children.”
Tim says “ever since I was 15 or 16 I've pretty much had a good friend die every year of my life and there’s not a year goes by that someone doesn't pass away not because of ordinary deaths, yeah they've all either taken their own life or drug overdose or what not.”
Tim says experience has taught him that if someone talks about suicide “grab them by both hands because they can be serious”. He worries about the casual attitude that some teenagers have towards taking their own life. “A lot of younger generation they can treat it without any respect,” he says. “People who cut their wrists and things, yep, they're crying out for help but there's also ones who don't really want to do it but they make the attempt and sometimes it's too late.” He says it’s all too easy for a suicide attempt to succeed, even if it is not intended to. “They try to hang themselves and they might not want to do it but they might actually slip off the stool and lo and behold it's too late for them too.”
“There's lots of accidental deaths and there's ones that shouldn’t happen at all and a lot of the people that have passed away... it’s a great loss to every one around them not just themselves,” he says. Despite his strong stance against suicide, Tim doesn’t blame his friends for their actions. “[They] were trying but yeah, couldn't get over that hill, and decided to call it quits early.”
Tim was in his mid-twenties and working as a roadie for a local production company when he met Louise through Darren. “I was friends with Samantha,” says Louise, “and Darren and Samantha started going out together.” Darren's parents had sold the tavern “and they were having their last night. Samantha invited me up there- basically that was where I met Tim.”
Darren eleaborates: “Tim gets a bit of a twinkle in his eyes with the girls and the girls get a bit of a twinkle in their eyes with him. She saw him over at the bar there and - well from my perspective she pounced him! She might say they other way but all well.”
A few years later Darren and Donna had a baby girl and they lost touch with Tim. By the time rumours of Tim’s death started circulating, Darren says “it would have had to have been three years”.
“We used to see each other all the time before that,” says Darren. “I got pretty involved in my own life, when you've got kids there's plenty of things to keep you occupied. But yeah we hadn't spoken. I was a little bit narky that he hadn't met my daughter and that's possibly why.”
Of the three separate rumours about his death, Tim puts the first and third down to “chinese whispers”. The first, his alleged suicide, angered him because of his strong stance on the subject. The most recent simply scared him. He was driving on the east coast of Tasmania when he got a phone call from a friend. They had heard Tim was found floating upside down in a river. “Was it murder?” he asks.“Was someone supposed to have put me there?”
It was the the second of the three, however, that was the most remarkable both in terms of circumstance and the effect it had on Tim personally.
Tim had moved into a house with Louise in Hobart, but was holidaying on the mainland and keeping his phone turned off most of the time. It was not long after he had left that a death notice bearing his name appeared in the Mercury, Hobart’s daily newspaper.
A relative rang Louise to check whether it was her Tim. She said it wasn’t, and as far as his family was concerned, that was the end of the matter. For his friends though, it was only the beginning.
In the same week notes appeared on the pin-boards of the Roadhouse, a drop-in centre in Hobart’s northern suburbs and the Link, a youth health centre in central Hobart. They all said the same thing: “Rest In Peace Rocky”.
”I had people knocking at the door, friends ringing other friends, friends ringing my parents, and while all the time I was on the mainland having a ball of a time,” says Tim. “The whole time I was away I had people upset, in tears, wondering what was going on and yes I was oblivious to it all.”
The rumour gained strength, he says, because most people did not want to ring Louise in case they were the ones to break the news to her. “My parents hadn't seen me for a while, they weren't sure,” he says, “and some other friends didn't want go asking my parents because they didn't want to be the ones telling them.”
One friend, Gary, says he waited more than a week to find out the truth. Tim had helped him move into a house in the small southern town of Dover a few days before his phone rang. It was his girlfriend - she’d heard secondhand that Tim had died. He was supposed to ring her back after she’d done some checking around to see if it was true.
Problem was, Gary couldn’t ring back. He was stuck on the outskirts of a country town with no petrol and no phone credit. It was only when his Centrelink payment arrived that he could drive to a friend’s place to use the phone.
It was about this time that Darren heard the news. The rumour had made it to the Cascade Brewery in the foothills of Mount Wellington. The workers there knew them both from their time in Fern Tree.
Darren says, “I heard from the Cascade brewery network that Tim had passed away. I just went into ‘oh shit’ mode. 'Oh shit’. It was instantly devestating.”
A week later Tim got back from his trip and heard the stories. Slowly he pieced the puzzle together. Two people had died, one with the same name and another with the same nickname. “As far as I know there's been a few other Rockys around Tasmania,” he says. “One out at Glenorchy, had passed away.” He was around the same age as Tim.
Tim was disappointed at suggestions he had overdosed. “The drugs they said, I don’t do them” he says. He says the whole experience has been bizarre. “Being told you've died and sort of nearly seeing your own death, it's a pretty funny feeling being the walking dead,” he says. “People come up to you in town and say ‘I thought you were dead’ and you're standing right there in front of them. I’m not sure who's shell shocked more, me or them.”
Darren had been too distressed to rely on the rumour. “I had to believe it for myself,” he said. “It didn't take much checking out - just a ring to miss Louise.”
The day after Tim arrived back, Darren and Samantha went to see him. Darren says the shock of the whole affair convinced him to put aside any ill feelings he may have had. “There's no point wasting time,” he says. “Get on with it and have some fun.”
Tim says when he saw Darren and Samantha there were “hugs and kisses all around”. “There he is standing at my front door, I hadn't seen him for 3 years and it took that to get us back together,” he says. “I've been happy to have him back in my life and it brought that to do it.”
Tim says the experience has changed his perspective. “It has changed my thinking a bit,” he says. “There's a lot more too this life, don't leave it all too late.”
“I’m in at life for the long run and I'm going to make a hell of a time while I'm here and speak to the big feller upstairs when I get there.”
*People’s names have been changed in this article at their request.
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