The Herald Sun conducts a very open interview with Rove as he speaks about his new life with Tasma Walton, his trip to Africa and his reaction to the tabloids.
ROVE McManus can remember the dark days only too well. In the months after his wife Belinda Emmett’s death, he rarely ventured out.
When he did, he felt the eyes of the world burning into his back.
“I had intentionally shut myself off, but I didn’t feel anonymous, I felt the complete opposite,” he remembers.
“God, I just didn’t head out and if I did it was with a cap, sunglasses and an iPod.
“If anything, I was feeling like I had this huge arrow pointing at me all the time, going ‘that’s him, that’s him’.
“So it, for me, was a matter of blocking it out, stopping anything from coming in, I suppose.”
But today he’s talking extensively for the first time about the bleak, dark days after Emmett died, admitting he never thought he would again find true happiness.
When shown a snap where, on an African mountain hike with Walton, they have an arm around each other, McManus smiles broadly.
“This is in Uganda – Bwindi — and what I loved about it is that it’s called the windy, impenetrable rainforest and it really does live up to its reputation,” he says.
“She (Walton) is an outdoorsy sort of person and we are very similar people in that respect.
“There’s a nice mix of happily getting dirty looking for animals in the wildest jungles on the planet, and quite happily sitting at home not doing much at all – and being happy in both circumstances.”
Asked if he looks at the photo and sees a degree of happiness that, two years ago, he thought impossible, McManus adds: “Yes, and not only that, it’s wonderful to have someone to share it with again.”
He bristles at the mention of being stalked by paparazzi and of reading unsourced magazine quotes from so-called friends.
“This is from the same type of people who used to write about Belinda and I and our plans for children, which we couldn’t have because of her illness . . . it was just an impossibility,” McManus says. “Sometimes it’s very cold-hearted. Sometimes I think they just don’t think about that kind of thing.
“Sometimes you go to step outside your front door and there’s a guy in a van with a camera who has been there for four days. That makes you think, ‘What am I wearing, am I scratching my nose and will they say I’m picking it’?”
