Grey Areas with Petra Bagust

Sir Ashley Bloomfield spent 300-odd consecutive days walking out to a lectern and telling New Zealand the status of the public health plan. As Director-General of Health through the COVID-19 pandemic, he became one of the most recognisable faces in the country's history. Calm, consistent, and quietly formidable/ a constant presence. Five years on, he's a professor at the University of Auckland, CEO of Public Health and Forensic Science, and, as of March this year, 60 years old.

In this kōrero, Petra sits down with Ashley for a broad conversation that moves from COVID reflections to growing up in Tawa, from his challenging leadership philosophy to the public health win he's most proud of, one that's adding nearly a year to the life expectancy of wāhine Māori and barely made the news.

Ashley talks honestly about what it was like to lead through the pandemic and why he hopes the inquiry findings will be used to strengthen Aotearoa's future response rather than score political points. He reflects on the stranger who stopped him on a Wellington street and how that moment helped Ashley frame the season.

Ashley outlines the four values he returns to again and again, kindness, courage, integrity, and humility, and why self-doubt is a feature not a bug.

There's also a meander down memory lane into Ashley's early years, the year off medical school hitchhiking around Europe, sailing a yacht back from Australia, and working on a dairy farm in the UK. The Territorial Army training that stress-tested him in ways that would matter decades later.

And there's the long game of public health, the slow, unsexy, generation-spanning work that doesn't get thanked, and why aging is, in Ashley's view, humankind's greatest achievement.

This is a deeply decent conversation about what good leadership looks like and what it feels like to dare to be hopeful.

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Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Louker and published by Songbroker.
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Morgana O'Reilly is an actor, writer, and one-woman force of nature whose credits span Billy T James Award-nominated theatre, Mean Mums, Neighbours, an Emmy award-winning covid comedy thriller series called INSiDE, and White Lotus. Her one-woman show ‘Stories About My Body’, a sellout tour exploring what it means to live inside a female body across the seasons of life, has just been made into a film, crowdfunded on kindness and released into New Zealand cinemas in July. Buckle up for a rollicking ride.

In this kōrero, Morgana and Petra have the kind of conversation that goes absolutely everywhere and enjoys every twist and turn. They talk about bodies, the loathing, the wrestling, the slow, imperfect, ongoing journey of coming home to yourself. Morgana shares the internal voice that shows up when disappointment strikes (“too fat, too old, too fat, too old”), as well as the realisation that her body has been bearing the brunt of any professional rejection for years, when really it's never been her body's fault at all.

Morgana offers her insightful framework of whether she’s engaging in conforming or adorning as a woman and an actress. It’s a very useful frame of reference for thinking about makeup, botox, aging, and beauty standards as we move through life. The question Morgana now asks herself whenever she considers changing something about how she looks: is this a celebration, or is it an apology? They talk about dopamine as the hormone of feminism, slow-release versus quick-hit joy, and why exercise stopped being about weight and became about keeping her brain juicy, pink, and moist.

There's a beautiful thread about what life looks like when the White Lotus tide recedes, the blue months, the practical brain that books the GP and the blood test but has yet to action the blood test, and what it means to succeed as an artist in cycles rather than destinations. And there's the game Morgana plays with her daughter, which might be the most quietly useful parenting tool in the entire season: what is life filled with? Pain. Which is why we have to find the joys.

This one is funny, warm, wise, and genuinely fizzy. Don't miss the boob impersonation.

Support the show: greyareas.nz/support

Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Louker and published by Songbroker.
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Brodie Kane does not lead a quiet life. The week Petra sits down with her, she's training for the Noosa Half Marathon, producing two podcasts, prepping a live show, MCing events across the country, and running Brodie Kane Media as a one woman band. She is, by her own admission, running around like a “blue-arse fly”. And when things are getting out of hand, she's getting better at noticing it - which is progress.

In this kōrero, Brodie and Petra cover a lot of ground, talking about what it actually means to be self-employed, the freedom, the loneliness, the addictive achievement loop of answering one more text. And why giving your brain genuine rest is one of the most radical things you can do in a world that has made constant availability the default setting. 

Brodie talks about sitting in a doctor's waiting room for 20 minutes without looking at her phone, and crossing the Harbour Bridge on the bus listening to Toto's “Africa”. Both feel like acts of quiet rebellion in an age that wants us to be chronically online.

They get into the formation of Brodie Kane, where her fire comes from, the mum who stormed out of council meetings and took on patriarchy without apology, the grandfather who was a trade unionist, the dad who is, in Brodie's words, probably more of a feminist than she is. 

Brodie talks about what it means to have a platform and choose to use it to advocate for issues she cares about and why she'd rather anger some dudes on X than have nothing to say when her grandkids ask, “What did you do?”

There's also Dancing with the Stars, the podcast empire that grew and then wisely contracted, a conscious uncoupling from Stuff, a new partnership with MediaWorks, and the rebrand of Girls Uninterrupted to Let Her Finish. 

And there's Josh, found unexpectedly, met while emceeing something in Rotorua, calm to her chaos, beautiful soul, and what it looks like to build a long-distance relationship on intention, communication, and genuine compromise at 39 when you know who you are.

This one is feisty, fun and genuinely energising. Brodie Kane in full flight is something to behold.

Support the show: greyareas.nz/support 

Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Looker and published by Songbroker.

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Robyn Malcolm is one of New Zealand's most beloved actors. And at 61, she is, by her own account, having the time of her life. In this kōrero, Petra sits down with Robyn who’s beaming in from Glasgow, while watching squirrels in the park, writing a new project with After the Party collaborator Diane Taylor, and settling into a life that looks nothing like the one she'd have planned, and everything like the one she was always meant to live.

This is a conversation that goes everywhere and earns every turn. Robyn and Petra talk about what it actually feels like to arrive at 60, the falling-over-less-scared-of-it, the inhabiting-your-own-space, the finding-it-funnier quality of a life that has already survived its worst moments. 

Robyn talks about aging in an industry obsessed with youth, the Mar-a-Lago face appearing on actresses she admires, and why aspirational casting is, in her view, utterly false, because what women actually want to see on screen is themselves.

They get into Robyn's late ADHD diagnosis, sparked, she says, by a Grey Areas episode, and the Rubik's Cube moment when everything she'd been told about herself clicked into place. The laziness, the avoidance, the "imagine what you could've done if you'd done some work" rewritten, at last, through a kinder and more accurate lens.

The conversation moves into menopause, sexuality, and shame. And Robyn speaks openly about the documentary she's been making all around Aotearoa on menopause and mental health, including a revelation about the relationship between estrogen loss and mental health that she says astounded her. She talks about why women won't discuss sex in groups until someone goes first, why shame is the real barrier to desire in midlife, and what happened when she brought a model of the clitoris to a room full of Southland women at the Shepherdess's Muster.

Warm, wide-ranging, laugh-out-loud funny, and quietly profound, this one is a delight from start to finish.

Support the show: greyareas.nz/support 

Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Looker and published by Songbroker.
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Most conversations about menopause cover hot flushes, brain fog, and sleep. Far fewer talk about what's happening below the waist, and for up to 84% of women, that silence comes at a real cost.

Dr Iona Weir is a cell biologist, inventor, and founder of biotech company Myregyna®. Her life's work centres on apoptosis, the process of programmed cell death, and specifically how compounds found in plants can reverse it. After decades developing pharmaceuticals and skincare, she turned her science towards one of the most underserved areas in women's health: genital urinary syndrome of menopause, or GSM.

In this kōrero, Petra and Iona unpack what GSM actually is, and why it's so much more than vaginal dryness. From thinning urethral tissue and recurring UTIs to bladder urgency and prolapse risk, the downstream effects of declining oestrogen on this whole system are significant, under-diagnosed, and largely preventable. Iona explains the science of what's happening at a cellular level, what women can do to get ahead of it, and why pelvic floor health is one of the most important investments a woman in midlife can make.

They also get into Iona's remarkable origin story, from being the first person in the world to suggest apoptosis occurs in plants, to an outrageously creative work around to secure her PhD funding, to becoming one of New Zealand's few female biotech founders. At nearly 60, she's heading to BTS in Paris, going to ABBA Voyage in London, and is actively working on securing approval from the US FDA.

This episode also takes an honest look at the wellness and supplement industry from someone who has spent her career inside it. Iona's advice? Skip the vitamin cabinet. Eat the salmon cracker platter. Rotate your supplements. And stop spending money on treatments that will thin your skin now and leave you looking worse at 80.

This episode contains discussion of pelvic floor health, vaginal atrophy, UTIs, and sexual function.

Listen to the pelvic floor health episode we referenced in this episode: It's time we talked about our pelvic floors | Tania McLean + Melissa Davidson

Support the show: greyareas.nz/support 

Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Looker and published by Songbroker.
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