Latest news with #PetraBagust
NZ Herald
6 days ago
- Health
- NZ Herald
You're allowed to grieve during menopause, but you should be joyful too
And if this is true, I cannot get out. I can't run for cover. I started doing a bit of investigation. I was feeling confronted by the idea – because I'd only heard negative things about menopause – but also intrigued. I let curiosity get the better of me. I remembered hearing a doctor present in Nelson years earlier and saying, 'there is nothing good about menopause'. And I thought, this simply cannot be true. It doesn't make sense for it to only be bad for all women; we are not, surely, just going to shrivel up and cognitively and physically die. I went to see my GP and asked her if she could support me on my menopausal journey. It was an amusing session. She recommended a documentary movie to watch and to visit the 'daily pool of essence'. I suspect she was suggesting I learn to meditate and work out what I needed by paying attention to my own body and brain, which was benign if vague advice. It was neither alarmist nor super helpful, (perhaps because I didn't 'visit the pool' enough), so in 2019 I started making reels about being perimenopausal, leaning-in to the hilarity, frivolity and reality of it because leaning away wasn't my style, and recognising my own social media moment of being 'outed' had activated significant feelings of shame. The shame motivated me to want other women's responses to be different and more positive. Why was perimenopause something to hide and be embarrassed about? The way women, men and society in general thought and talked about this important hormonal transition needed to change. Petra Bagust (left) and Niki Bezzant have heard from thousands of New Zealand women about their experiences of menopause. Photo / Supplied It has been a very joyful journey. I started talking about it within my family. My husband didn't have to keep thinking I was losing my mind because I couldn't finish my sentences. If I blew up at the children, I could say, 'Look guys, I honestly think that was a hormonal moment'. I found I carried a lot less guilt and shame personally (even though they sometimes questioned whether it was just an excuse for bad behaviour). Menopause is like the reverse of puberty, but it's different in the sense that it's far less visible. There's no growth spurt, attractive body changes, voice drops or pimples; those obvious physical signals are not there. I think this has added to the mystery and the hidden nature of perimenopause and makes talking about it now so essential. As my journey went on, I started reading and getting my hands on books (at that time the only homegrown one I could find was Dr Bev Lawton's no-frills Menopause, so I imported a few others). I started talking about menopause on my Grey Areas podcast with experts and with well-known women who were also going through it and were willing to talk about it. It felt like diving into the pool that we were all supposed to stay away from. Importantly, I've learned we don't have to pathologise menopause. It is the end of reproduction. You're allowed to grieve and process that reality. And you're allowed to move on from it; it's a doorway to the rest of our lives as women. I love the descriptions of menopause as a second spring. I enjoy the freedom of not having to be objectified sexually; not having to focus so much time, energy and resource on looking young; of not having to squish myself into a mould of how I perceive I 'should' behave and speak. There's so much freedom in being a more mature, wise woman. Maybe that's partly why menopause has been framed as 'bad' in the past. Women in this season are more likely to stand up for what's important to them and to disagree with authority, which has been traditionally male-led. They're likely to want to do things outside of the domestic sphere. Perhaps women's arrival at this new freedom and profound agency is disruptive for traditional patriarchal society, so it made sense that menopause has been positioned as negative. It's helpful to the status quo if the narrative around 'the change' is dismissive or produces suspicion and doubt because then women will want to avoid showing they are going through it and men won't have to deal with them speaking up and acting out. My co-host Niki Bezzant and I are determined to bust that narrative open. So we're on the road with the Hot Mess Tour because it makes a significant difference to be in a room full of human beings who are in the same season of life as you. There is a beautiful, unknown element of communal comradery. We know that we can't raise children on our own, we are designed to do life in community. So the sense of being in community – even for a night – is impactful. When women show up with their partners or their mates, and laugh and learn and experience that sense of not being alone or broken, not being wrong, not being discarded, not being used up – but being free from the need to reproduce and to behave – it's wonderful. The days of menopause being shrouded in silence are over. The Hot Mess Tour is on now around New Zealand. For more information and tickets see
The Spinoff
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
‘We broke into Team NZ's compound': Petra Bagust on the joyful chaos of Ice TV
TV presenter and podcast host Petra Bagust takes us through her life in television. Petra Bagust never wanted to be on television. As a university student in Christchurch, she read Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves To Death, a best-selling text that warned that television was bad for humanity. So when Bagust began hosting a music television show on Canterbury's Cry TV in the mid 1990s – and enjoyed every minute of it – she struggled with her unexpected fondness for the telly. 'I really loved being on it, it was so fun, but I was also suspicious that it wasn't that good for us. It was a conundrum.' From those tricky beginnings, Bagust went on to build an impressive 30-year career in broadcasting and television. Her first major TV role was in 1995 as a co-host of youth show Ice TV, and when the series ended after six years, Bagust moved on to present a variety of beloved New Zealand shows like Hot Property, Breakfast, What's Really in Our Food and The Project NZ. These days Bagust works as an MC and a chaplain, but you're most likely to find her behind the microphone in Grey Areas, her award-winning podcast that explores the complexities of growing older in Aotearoa. Bagust describes Grey Areas as the most fulfilling work of her long and varied career. 'There's an intimacy in podcasting that's profound,' she tells The Spinoff. 'You can follow a thread and make discoveries, and the person you're talking to can make discoveries. There's an immense reciprocity to it.' It's this type of connection that inspired Bagust to team up with her friend and author Niki Bezzant for Hot Mess, an upcoming speaking tour about the challenges of navigating midlife and menopause. 'It's about being in the room together,' says Bagust of meeting audiences around the motu. 'It's about saying, this is tough and elements of it suck and also it's hilarious and let's go.' We got in the room with Bagust to ask about her life in television, which began all those years ago in Cry TV's unlikely studio – a double garage attached to a former nunnery, high in the Port Hills. 'When I got into telly, they were like, 'oh, the golden days are over,' Bagust chuckles. 'I look back now and I'm like, 'no, they weren't'. There was still a gold-plated patina to it.' From After School to Ice TV to Christmas in the Park, this is Petra Bagust's golden life in television. My earliest TV memory is… I have this very vivid memory as a young girl of watching Miss New Zealand and my mind boggling at swimsuits with high heels. I love the beach and I love being in water, so I didn't understand swimsuits and high heels. The TV show I used to rush home from school to watch was… After School with Olly Ohlson. I was so excited to see him at the baggage carousel at Dunedin Airport, 20 years after the show finished. My earliest TV crush was… Dirk Benedict, who played Lieutenant Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica. He was quite clean cut, but he didn't take himself too seriously. The TV ad I can't stop thinking about is… A Mitre 10 ' DIY: It's in our DNA ' ad. It could be because our daughter was cast in it. The teacher calls out a roll and every person's name is a tool that you would buy at Mitre 10, so there's Polly Filler and Dwayne Pipe and Bill Dingpermit. Our daughter ended up with heaps of her mates in it. I remember the makeup artist accidentally put a little burn on the teacher's neck with the hair tongs, so she's wearing a scarf in the ad. My first ever appearance on TV was… On regional music television in Ōtautahi, Christchurch, on Cry TV. I did Monday to Friday, 6-9pm. I was at uni all day, and then I would drive in my Morris Marina up the Port Hills, 15km to the studio, and I would sit and host a video show for three hours. I remember my very first time on camera when they were counting down the seconds and my entire body said 'run!' I didn't, and that was the beginning. My most watched TV show of all time is… Every series of Pride and Prejudice. I'm a full sucker. Matthew McFadyen is my number one Darcy. My favourite TV moment from my own career is… Christmas in the Park. One year it rained the whole night. There were thousands of people who sat in the rain and watched, and we were on stage, talking and singing and dancing our hearts out. There was something truly joyous about it, in the overcoming of the adversity. But it would also equally be sitting on a couch with Jon [Bridges] and Nathan [Rarere] on Ice TV just cracking up, riffing on something and then throwing to Bic Runga or Dave Dobbyn. It's being in the room with people you love and a live audience, and just being in awe of the talent that's around you. My favourite TV character of all time is… Linda Carter's Wonder Woman, Slow Horses' Jackson Lamb, and Ted Lasso. Just a nice combo of those three people. My enduring memory of Ice TV is… It was my grown-up adolescence. We got to dream up ideas and then make them. We made our own comedy-dramas – I was always the police chief or the hospital chief, and every line I had, I was shouting. We threw stuff off a building in Off A Building. The execs at TV3 said, 'you're not allowed on the sixth floor of the building'. They were worried we were going to prank them, so we did At A Building and Near A Building and Beside A Building. The following year we thought 'why don't we blow stuff up with dynamite?' But none of it was better than Off A Building. It was pure play, and in the late 90s, there wasn't YouTube, there weren't cameras everywhere. Nathan, Jon and I would drive around the city with camcorders, shoot stuff and take it back to a director, and they would cut it into something hilarious. We shot an entire show from a hot tub on a hotel roof in Queenstown. We were literally in our togs making telly. We got to break into Team New Zealand's compound. Jonny Bridges dove in and he added a little teeny, tiny fan motor to the bottom of the boat. We got to be like, 'let's drive to Cape Reinga!' It was amazing. The most stylish person on television is… Melissa Stokes, 1News' weekend newsreader. She is even more stylish off television than she is on. She loves New Zealand designers, she believes in creativity, and she's willing to push the boat out. The TV show I wish I was involved with is… I was desperate to be on Intrepid Journeys, but I was on TV3 and it was a TVNZ show. The other show that I thought was absolutely genius was Making Tracks by Nick Dwyer. He took iconic New Zealand songs and went to another country to record a new version with, say, a New Orleans brass band. My controversial TV opinion is… TV would improve if there were more middle-aged women with grey hair on it. The show I'll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to is… Game of Thrones and Squid Games. I won't watch anything that's already up to three seasons. I can't commit the time. The last thing I watched on TV was… The Warriors game on Saturday night, where they won in the final seconds. But I wasn't really paying attention, so you probably can't count it.
NZ Herald
29-04-2025
- Automotive
- NZ Herald
Petra Bagust: The hardest part of teaching your kids to drive is letting go
This article was prepared by Petra Bagust for AMI and is being published by the New Zealand Herald as advertorial. Like it is for many young people coming of age, getting my driver's licence as a teenager, opened up the road to freedom and independence – though becoming a fully licensed driver had its share of potholes. I still vividly remember meeting my match at one particular roundabout, where my ability to stall reached a zenith. After four or five failed attempts to move forward, I put the handbrake on in the middle of the road, got out of the driver's seat, walked around to the other side of the car and made my father drive me home. Eventually I did master driving stick, and it's been a gift for my husband and I to teach all our children how to drive a manual in the last few years. Our two eldest are on their full licences, and our youngest is on his restricted and counting down the days until he's on his full. It's given them the same sense of agency and freedom I remember feeling when I got my licence at 18. I have to say though, it's a different experience as a parent. After years of ferrying everyone everywhere, there's that moment you watch them drive away for the first time by themselves. There's a sense of pride, of course there is – but the exposure also hit me, because I realised I would be totally helpless if anything was to go wrong. Watching the people I love most in the world drive away and having to trust they make it home again was a transitional moment for me. I see in my eldest son that sense of invincibility many freshly minted drivers have ('I can go anywhere, do anything, any time I want!') which only exists because you haven't yet experienced all the ways your car can fail you. You haven't popped a tyre on a quiet country road hours from home or had to approach strangers for a jump-start during a road trip. All this was brought home recently when my daughter and her boyfriend decided to make the ambitious drive from Dunedin, where she was studying, all the way back to our home in Auckland. It takes around 20 hours of driving and requires travel through some of Aotearoa's most majestic but challenging landscapes – mountains, a desert, an ocean! I was excited for them, but when my daughter told me 'I don't know if the car will make it home, it's been playing up recently', I couldn't stop thinking about how vulnerable they were. Two young adults with not a tonne of driving experience between them, putting all their faith in a 1996 Toyota Carib. It was one of those parenting moments where you go, what do you do? They've got time commitments they need to be back for, holiday jobs and a ferry crossing that hinge on them getting where they need to be at the right time. All we could do is cross our fingers and hope. We're grateful they did make it and everything went as well as it could. But it made us sit up and think, when we aren't able to help our children, who is? Thankfully, we have found a solution to this dilemma in the form of AMI Roadside Rescue. It's a great service that gives drivers (and their parents!) the peace of mind that when they set out to explore this beautiful country, someone has their back if they break down, get a flat tyre or battery, run out of fuel, or need a minor roadside repair. What I'm most excited about is AMI has decided to provide this service for free for the first 12 months for all new restricted or full licence holders, regardless of if they are insured with AMI or not – at no cost, and with no hooks. Such good news for my kids who are trying their best to stick to their modest student budgets! With AMI Roadside Rescue you also get unlimited callouts from day one, and coverage for you and any car you drive, as well as anyone driving your car – they're the only roadside service to offer those benefits. And as the parent of adult children – one of who now lives in a different city to me and another who travels regularly to see her out-of-town boyfriend – I love that the service is available to them throughout the country, 24 hours a day. What a game changer. So, while I'll continue to wish I could be there to help out when things go awry, I won't have to worry when I watch my kids drive away on any adventure. And as they continue to learn the hard-won lessons of the road – like we all did – I can take comfort in knowing they have a safety net.
