Former high-flyer’s long goodbye

Author pulling rabbit out of hat for family as disease begins to take toll

THEY call it the long goodbye.

Wayne Patterson once soared with the high-flyers of the business world.

Today he is on borrowed time as he sits on a veranda in the beautiful home he shares with wife Lisa at Hope Island, looking out over the Coomera River and contemplating a cartoon rabbit as he builds a legacy for his children, the grandchildren to come and perhaps the rest of the world.

Motor neurone disease is robbing him of voice and movement. A neurologist hit him with the devastating diagnosis two years ago.

As Mr Patterson says, there is no cure, no treatment and no known cause. Life expectancy of MND victims is usually two to five years. His only certainty is that MND will kill him.

“It was a terrible shock,’’ he said this week.

“I thought it was going to be throat cancer or something like that. My voice had started to go. Every time I spoke for a while, my throat got very sore.’’

In his darkest moments he might have wondered about euthanasia, but there remains too much to achieve and too much to live for.

Staggered by his predicament, he had thought hard about how he could leave his failing “voice’’ for his children’s children, passing on family values and also finding a way to fund ongoing research into the disease. Enter the rabbit. When he was aged around 15, he would doodle on scraps of paper and that progressed to a cartoon rabbit, sketched on the inside of his wardrobe door.

He called the creation Fat Rabbit and now, at age 61, he has brought his cartoon mate out of retirement.

Fat Rabbit has become the hero of a series of children’s books the former motor mechanic and CEO of national trucking insurer NTI has penned and self-published, with the help of book marketing and author mentor Ocean Reeve.

Three of the books – Fat Rabbit, Fat Rabbit Counts and Fat Rabbit’s Burp – have been published and a fourth, Fat Rabbit and the Cheeky Coconuts, is being printed.

The first two are pitched at young children, telling how Fat Rabbit lives in a magical place called Carrot Top Island and helping kids learn how to count, but the themes grow with the readership.

The third book is about manners and the fourth has a message about respect and playing fair.

The books have sold more than 4000 copies, which is a fair achievement in Australian publishing.

“I’d always been enchanted by the idea you can take the top off a carrot, put it in water