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The only time Gillian Hallac sees her mother’s face now is on the posters she puts up around town. Yvonne Whear can be seen half-smiling on the counters and walls of shops, cafes and supermarkets.

But it has been six months since Hallac heard her mother’s voice. “It’s like I was talking to her and then she was gone,” she says.

Whear, 73, had just started art classes at Tafe. “She was always interested in art, it was something she always wanted to do,” says Hallac.

“She was always doing courses and learning new skills.”

A pensioner who worked in aged care, Whear has four children, 15 grandchildren and many animals.

On 19 February Whear left her class at Murwillumbah, New South Wales, at 3pm.

At 3.15pm she was seen on CCTV buying orange juice and putting $50 credit on her phone at the Shell service station on Tweed Valley Way – the last activity recorded on her bank account.

At 3.22pm she was picked up on another CCTV camera driving along Queensland Road.

That was the last time she was seen.

She drove out through the cane fields that give way to cattle country in the hamlet of Dungay, her home of 23 years. Behind Dungay are the rainforest-covered foothills that rise up to the McPherson Range.

Phone records show Whear watched art tutorials on YouTube at 4.24pm and checked her voicemail at 4.48pm.

And then she vanished.

Hallac has barely slept since and says she feels her life is in limbo.

Without warning, she and her family have entered the bewildering world of ambiguous loss, a state of shock and grief.

At 8.30pm there was a sighting of Whear’s car, a gold Ford Escape wagon, parked in the dark with no lights on, on Dungay Creek Road, less than a kilometre from where she lived.

“We just have a witness, not a confirmed video,” says Hallac. Her family say Whear was very uncomfortable with driving at night and avoided doing so.

A tower near her home recorded a ping from her phone at 10.10am the next morning and then went silent.

Her phone and car are also missing.

When she couldn’t contact her mother, Hallac went to the small farm where Whear kept her many animals.

She found her mother’s boots and hat – the same ones Whear was wearing in the CCTV footage from earlier that day. She had food in the slow cooker, clothes were folded on the bed for the next day, her usual shoes at the door.

But the farm gate wasn’t locked in the careful way Whear always locked it.

Although Whear was sociable, Hallac says “she preferred to be close to her animals and live alone”.

She kept ducks, chickens, dogs, rabbits and cats. “Yvonne was always with her animals and would never go anywhere because she could not leave them for more than a night,” says Hallac.

Since she disappeared, the poultry have proliferated. “Some of them came along after she went missing because they hatched … She would have been overjoyed watching them hatch, making sure they were safe and warm.”

Hallac now looks after her mother’s eleven ragdoll cats and goes to her mother’s home each day to feed all her animals.

“I wasn’t a cat person before,” she says, “but I am now.”

Hallac, who talked to her every day, says there was no indication that anything was wrong. “Nothing.”

Whear didn’t suffer depression. “She’s the type of person that would let you know if she was unhappy.”

Detective Acting Inspector Chris Elliott, Tweed-Byron district’s crime manager, says there has been “considerable speculation about what may have happened to her”.

He says there was no evidence to suggest Whear intended to voluntarily disappear.

“Detectives remain open to all possibilities.”

NSW police have deployed “significant resources”, including searches involving drones and helicopters, police boats and sonar equipment, trail bikes and officers conducting searches on foot and in vehicles.

Hallac believes someone may have taken Whear and hidden her car. “That is my belief as her daughter, based on what I know about the circumstances in which she disappeared.”

“I strongly believe there are people out there who know more than they are saying.”

Meanwhile, Whear’s family suffers, Hallac says. Her eight-year-old granddaughter Amelia asks “how long are we going to keep looking after her animals? Will we be helping grandma look after them when she comes back?”

“I miss her advice, her voice, her presence,” Hallac says.

“It’s the everyday moments that hurt the most – the ones we never thought we’d lose.

“We just need to know where she is and what has happened so our family can finally breathe again.”