The former Fairfax cartoonist, war correspondent and author of Australia's first comic strip, has drawn more live subjects than possibly anyone, breathing life into them but now it is leaving him as he struggles to reach his century on Monday.

A private ambulance will collect him on Saturday at noon from an eastern suburbs hospital and transport him to Danny's Seafood restaurant at La Perouse where his family will gather for a celebratory lunch.

His son Andrew says, "He has been the Eveready battery rabbit all his life and although his health has deteriorated in the past six months with pneumonia twice, he has such a strong will to reach 100."

Rafty kickstarted the Australian comic book industry with Jimmy Rodney on Secret Service and his caricatures span from English cricketer Walter Hammond in 1936 to former politician Peter Garrett in 2010.

He was the first in his craft to have his works chosen for commemorative stamps, when Australia Post chose sportsmen Victor Trumper, Walter Lindrum, Sir Norman Brookes and Darby Munro for a 1981 issue.

"I have drawn more people in the world from life than anyone before or likely to be in the future, with almost all signed by the subject," he told me in a 1997 interview. Of his Beatles sketch, he says he believes that it's the only one in the world autographed by all four. "They signed photographs but never drawings."

He has a Donald Bradman dated 1936, Frank Sedgman and Jimmy Carruthers together in the boxer's 1948 camp, Dame Mary Gilmore (1962), Harold Holt "three weeks before he drowned" in 1967 and Sir John Kerr (1985). Entertainers include Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra.

He has more than 250 Australian Olympians from the 1948 London Games, which he covered, to 2000 in Sydney. His drawings of world-class golfers, including a range on Jack Nicklaus, are a breathtaking walk down the fairway of memory.

One of his favourite stories is standing at a urinal with Australia's longest-serving prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, at the opening of the (now closed) Journalists Club in Surry Hills.

"While Menzies and I were releasing water, I asked him if he would open an exhibition I was holding in Canberra. 'Certainly,' said Menzies and the exhibition was duly held. Menzies brought along (his successors as Liberal leader) John Gorton, Billy McMahon, Billy Snedden and Harold Holt." Rafty says Menzies was not thin-skinned about cartoonists lampooning him. "Shortly after Menzies agreed to open my exhibition, his press office rang and asked if he could exhibit editorial cartoons Sir Robert had acquired over the years. Eight of the 12 cartoons were anti-Menzies."

Not all of Rafty's subjects have liked his drawings. He says of Peter "Zorba" Peters, a Manly rugby league player and journalist on the now defunct afternoon newspaper, The Sun: "Peters didn't like a drawing I did of him. He chased me up the stairs and was going to throw me out the fifth-floor window of Fairfax's old Broadway building. John Benaud (then sports editor and a former Test cricketer) stopped him."

Rafty demonstrated greater concern for the welfare of his Fairfax colleagues, once rescuing a Sun journalist and photographer from an Indonesian jail.

While in Singapore at the end of World War II, he received a cable from the Sun, saying, "Another war has started. Catch up with Sukarno."

He journeyed to Surabaya where Sukarno was involved in fierce fighting against Dutch and British forces.

Rafty befriended Sukarno, an art lover and convinced him to release the two men.

At age 95, he returned to Surabaya where an exhibition of his work chronicling Indonesia's struggle for independence was displayed.

Rafty's only wife Shirley, the mother of their five children, died three years ago.

Her death, together with that of his brother Stan, are the only sad memories he has in a bountiful life, which includes the awarding of an OAM in 1991.

Stan, who also worked at the Sun, enlisted at the outbreak of war, was captured at the fall of Singapore and drowned when the Japanese troop ship, Rakuyo Maru, was torpedoed by an American submarine on September 12, 1944.

Tony was on a US PT boat in the same sea, unaware death had its choice of two Raftys that night.

"Stan and I were in the same cyclone," said Tony who was the first to interview the 96 survivors.

"I still grieve for my brother," he said of Stan who died aged 26, leaving Tony to live a whirlwind life, two for the price of one.