Wayne started playing golf at the Windaroo Golf Club south of Brisbane after his family had moved to the new golf and residential development in the mid 1980’s. “I started playing golf at the age of twelve and with the help of dad Bill and my then coach, Bob Weir, managed to get my handicap down to scratch by the age of sixteen.” said Wayne. Wayne quickly graduated through the amateur ranks and made several Australian teams before deciding to turn professional in 2000.

After missing out on selection for the then four man Eisenhower Team which went to Germany in 2000 (those places went to Aaron Baddeley, Brad Lamb, Scott Gardiner and Andrew Webster), Wayne travelled to the US to play in Amateur events there, essentially funding the trip himself. “I played in several events and won the Eastern Amateur and qualified to play the US Amateur by gaining one of two spots available at my venue against 120 guys.”

“When I returned to Australia I was then keen to turn professional but was informed by the Australasian PGA Tour that I would not be granted any exemption, even though I had played for Australia that year. I was told that I could play one of the Development Tour events as an amateur so decided to play the Eastern Airlines event in Tamworth in country NSW. An hour before I was about to tee it up I was informed by Trevor Herden, the then PGA Tour Operations Manager, that I was not able to play the event as an amateur. In those days, because I had committed to playing stage two of the Tour School, I had effectively jeopardized my amateur status. Trevor added however that I could tee it up as a professional if I so chose. That was what I wanted anyway and so paid $50 to join the Tour and I teed it up for money for the first time that week.”

Wayne won that event, earning $18,000 in his first attempt at playing for money and then followed up with two further top tens in following Development Tour events. “I had not played enough events to get status on the Australasian PGA Tour that year so I went to Tour School and finished 13th. It was a ranking that gave me very few opportunities that season but when I returned to the Tour School in 2001 I qualified second.”

While maintaining his card on the Australasian Tour, Wayne has always been keen to play in Japan. “I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Brendan Jones, Paul Sheehan, Steve Conran and those guys who were quietly and successfully going about their business up there but I was struggling to gain full status. At the Tour School in 2002 I gained a low ranking which gave me only ten or so starts and even though I finished fifth in my first event I did not do enough retain status. When I went back in 2003, I missed out and then in 2004 I reached the final stage only to have my appendix burst nine days before.”

While it that was pretty disappointing not to have had the chance to graduate to the Japan Tour in 2005, it created an opportunity for Wayne to start a family and to work on his game and his body. “Vanessa and I figured that as I would be playing at home for another year that we would start a family and I would grind it out in the pro-ams in the hope that I could earn enough money to come back up here and have another crack at the Japan Tour.”

“While playing those pro-ams I met people from Tourism Queensland and Mazda Queensland who both assisted in my travel to the Tour School in Japan. I am an Ambassador for Tourism Queensland.”

Wayne also worked on his health and fitness during that time and established a player - coach relationship with Murray Lott who is based at the Brisbane Golf Club. “Murray has been great as he has focused not so much on my golf swing but on ways of improving my scoring. The first thing he did when we met was to ask me about my stats rather than rushing out with a camera and a seven iron to look at my swing. We isolated my weaknesses, of which wedge play was the worst, and focused on those areas.”

Late in 2005 Wayne once again began the long road to gaining his card on the Japan Golf Tour and made it to the finals. The event was held in the southern prefecture (province) of Kumamoto which, under normal circumstances, would have offered reasonable weather even that late in the year. “Japan experienced a bad winter that year and it started early. At both venues we were unable to get the tournament finished. After a lot of indecision it was finally decided to complete the tour school in March which meant I had three months to think about my position and the prospect of having my card or otherwise. It made it difficult to plan my year not knowing just what status I might have up here. When I returned I managed to improve my position from 14th to 12th but it could just as easily have gone in the other direction and in a big way.”
 
In 2006, therefore, with full status for the first time on the Japan Golf Tour, Wayne won the first Japan Golf Tour event of 2006, the Token Homemate Cup, near Nagoya. “I still can’t quite believe it,” he said referring to his two shot win over fellow countryman Brendan Jones and Japan’s Yui Ueda just a few hours after his win.

In what was a week of low scoring, Wayne opened with a first round of 64 but trailed in third place before joining the lead in round two. He was one shot behind third round leader Akinori Tani entering the final round but a last round of 67 saw him earn a career changing victory.

In the middle of all this Perske was in the process of buying a house at Wynumm in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs and prior to the win he was having the same concerns that everyone has when he was looking to borrow a lot of money to fund the purchase. The first person Wayne called to tell of the win was his wife Vanessa who, like Wayne himself, was excited by the win and the pressure it would take off them. “Last week we were wondering whether we should be borrowing so much money and now that concern is gone,” he said at the time. “The security of what is effectively three years exemption here, and the accompanying bonuses, are clearly going to make a lot of difference.” The winning purse at the Token Homemate event 22 million yen or A$255,000.

Wayne would go on to finish fourth at the Gateway to the Open event just a few weeks later, so named because it allows the leading few players to qualify for the British Open Championship and Wayne was off to Hoylake. He missed the cut at the Open Championship but it was further developing his experience and although the balance of the season in Japan was not all that productive he was established as one of the leading foreign players there.

In November of 2006, Wayne’s wife, Vanessa, gave birth to their second child, Billy who joined their daughter Lais (born in 2005) in the Perske family.