Still Walking

When Bill Moss decided in 1984 to leave a prestigious job and take a salary cut to join the boutique investment firm that later became Macquarie Bank, he faced the challenge of starting a real estate investment business from a small desk in an open-plan office, with just one  fulltime employee working for him. In its first year of operations, the business Moss had seemingly crazily agreed to take on made a profit of just $40,000.

Twenty-two years later, when he retired as the legendary head of Macquarie Bank’s real estate and banking division and one of Australia’s highest paid executives, Bill Moss AM had built a global business in real estate finance, development and fund management that stretched  across five continents from Africa to Asia, Europe, Australia and North America and created thousands of jobs.

Yet up until a few years before deciding to retire from the ‘Millionaires Factory’, Moss fought every step of the way to conceal a grim personal secret from work colleagues, business associates and friends – and most of all from himself. When he was 27, Moss had been told by doctors he had a degenerative and incurable muscle-wasting disease - a form of muscular dystrophy called FSHD, which the ambitious, driven young businessman was assured would leave him crippled in a wheelchair by the age of 50.

These memoirs are the inspirational, moving, blunt and at times very funny account of how a senior and seemingly all-powerful Macquarie banker struggled for years through physical discomfort, pain and the many barriers thrown in the path of people with physical disabilities, not just to rise to the international heights of a notoriously difficult profession but also gradually to face and come courageously to terms with his disability.

A multi-millionaire who began life in a fibro house in a working class suburb of Sydney, Moss is today a committed philanthropist, passionate campaigner for disability rights, and the founder of a global medical and scientific research foundation bringing hope to FSHD and other dystrophy sufferers around the world.

 “What do you do about having a disability? You do your research, work out what the solutions are and then start to educate those around you. You stand up and fight for what is right and just, you speak out and challenge the paradigms within which we live. You challenge politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, friends and colleagues. If you are living with a disability, you can challenge the status quo, you can change the system; it is simply about having a go and educating those around us, never giving up and just telling it as it is.”