What does it mean to live, work, and find profound grace when an incurable brain disease slowly tries to strip away your capacity, your movement, and your voice?

In this episode of Grey Areas, renowned Aotearoa director, screenwriter, and playwright Toa Fraser (No. 2, The Dead Lands, Sweet Tooth) joins Petra for a compelling kōrero while dealing with medication-induced dyskinesia about his career and his Parkinson’s diagnosis. Toa initially kept the disease hidden for five years, yet now chooses to view Parkinson’s as an invaluable path toward humility, collaboration, and gratitude. 

Drawing on the wisdom of Father Richard Rohr and the poignant example of his late father who faced his own physical decline with quiet equanimity, Toa reflects on what it looks like to use the second half of life wisely, how regular humiliation keeps the ego in check, and the life-changing impact of undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery while awake.

The episode then weaves into an extraordinary moment of serendipity as Petra connects with Josh Hough, a young father diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's at just 37. After randomly crossing paths with Petra on a flight home from Auckland, Josh shares his own confronting yet miraculous experience of brain surgery, the exhaustion of raising a toddler while losing physical function, and how reaching out to Toa on Instagram during his darkest hours gave him hope. Together, their stories form an unforgettable celebration of resilience, human connection, and discovering that life is always worth living whole-heartedly.

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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Singer-songwriter Georgia Lines has sat inside the messy, sticky chrysalis of life, facing her deepest fears, and emerged into her thirties proud of who she is.🦋🩵

Georgia speaks publicly for the first time about navigating the painful, terrifying journey of walking through a divorce in her twenties, the exact life event she had feared most since childhood. She reflects on how the weight of shame and the terror of being misunderstood kept her from speaking about it when her album The Rose of Jericho was released. She talks about processing her feelings and the sheer resilience it took to pour her heart into those songs in the middle of packing up and moving out of her home.

Together, Petra and Georgia explore the profound freedom of getting older, letting go of the need to control other people's narratives, and breaking free from the female reflex to apologise for taking up space. Georgia shares stories from her transformative year in Nashville, where southern hospitality and analog living helped her dismantle people-pleasing habits and see the emptiness of the fast-paced, AI-driven machine of modern pop songwriting. 

Georgia reveals what happens when you decide to tend to the quiet, unglamorous soil of creativity, choosing the tactile grit of cassette tapes and a brand-new snail-mail letter club called Dear Reader. They delve into wrestling with faith that will accompany you through the valley rather than acting as a transactional fix, the grounding ritual of sipping limoncello in an outdoor bath, and why you already have everything you need to make a good decision.

Sign up to the snail mail letter club, Dear Reader, at georgialinesmusic.com/dearreader

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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What do you do when the initial relief of a late diagnosis wears off and your ADHD brain starts kicking your ass again?

Petra sits down with counsellor, therapist, and researcher Charlotte Cummings for a deeply honest, liberating kōrero about the emotional reality of living with a neurodivergent brain. 

Charlotte opens up about her own journey toward an ADHD diagnosis, sparked by the sensory overload and executive function demands of parenthood, and explains why treating ADHD purely as a behavioral or workplace productivity issue misses the most crucial piece of the puzzle: our emotional, relational, and spiritual wellbeing.

Together, Petra and Charlotte unpack the messy reality of ADHD distress, over stimulation, and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), offering practical tools to step off the relentless productivity wheel. Charlotte shares how she builds intentional scaffolding into her life through daily decompression rhythms, weekly Thursday night baths, and flexible monthly habits without self-judgment. It is a warm, liberating conversation about learning to honor your unique brain, establishing circuit breakers against negative self-talk, and creating enough room in the world to fully become yourself.

Listen to Charlotte's podcast 'Mind You' on Spotify or YouTube, and find out more at charlottecummings.nz.

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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What does leadership look like when you step onto the periphery and commit to being a good neighbour above pretty much everything else?

In this expansive and unexpectedly funny episode of Grey Areas, Petra sits down with Archbishop Justin Duckworth, the dreadlocked, mostly barefoot Anglican Archbishop of Aotearoa, New Zealand Tikanga Pākehā. 

From growing up in Stokes Valley with no church background to living in central Wellington and working with people who live on the margins. His motivation was and is to make life a little more bearable for people who were struggling, to add a bit more joy, to prioritize those who aren't being prioritized, whose voices are not heard, or aren't heard enough. “I think… when I look back over my life, that is what drives me.” Justin is now based on a regional edge in Whanganui with his wife Jenny, and unpacks why locating himself on the margins keeps his perspective grounded and his heart open.

Together, Petra and Justin get meta about the high-stakes cost of modern leadership, why we've created a culture where broken leaders are cast aside rather than restored, and how the "Western capitalist dream" has left a generation searching for a deeper, more meaningful story. Justin tackles complex global issues, from climate change and AI to political tribalism, through the lens of grace, forgiveness, and radical humility.

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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What does it take to stop drifting toward frailty as we age, to challenge the "live within your means" mindset, and completely rewrite how we approach both our finances and our health? Well, I’d ask Hannah McQueen… so I did.

In this fiery episode of Grey Areas, Petra sits down with force-of-nature Hannah McQueen, chartered accountant, founder of EnableMe, and creator of the healthcare venture Age Brightly. 

Hannah traces her journey from calculating an eight-page calculus formula to pay off her own mortgage, to helping tens of thousands of New Zealanders break free from the "death grip" of compound interest and master the emotional psychology of money.

Now, Hannah is taking that same bold, system-challenging energy into a new mission: ageing brightly. After witnessing a client face a sudden $750,000 crisis to place a parent into rest home care, Hannah began pulling on a thread that led her to launch Age Brightly, a private, geriatrician-led healthcare service aimed at detecting early biological decline, preventing unnecessary hospital admissions, and slowing down cognitive decline like dementia.

Together, Hannah and I explore why money and health are deeply emotional rather than purely logical, the power of coming "down the mountain" to fight for families, and why we must start honoring our elders by giving them more good, vibrant years rather than just more years of existence.

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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What do you do when you’re feeling in "rude good health," working across your dream broadcasting gigs, and a routine test turns your world upside down in an afternoon?

Seasoned Kiwi broadcaster Mel Homer was checking her heart health via a blood test when hours later, she was admitted to hospital, diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A rare, aggressive, and life-threatening blood cancer that gave her zero warning.   

In this raw and courageously funny episode, Petra sits down with her longtime broadcasting peer to unpack the long, high-stakes journey through "scorched earth" chemotherapy, biopsies and eyeball bleeds, and losing her hair, to finding a life-saving stem cell donor in a young French woman on the other side of the globe. Relief and love showed up in quirky moments, like sending her adult sons via FaceTime to search through her drawers for comfy undies.

Mel opens up about the terrifying reality of high-risk genetic mutations, the brutal physical toll of Graft-versus-Host disease, and the emotional shift from survival mode to navigating recovery as "Mel Homer 2.0". 

Together, Petra and Mel explore why aging in your 50s is a profound privilege, the importance of keeping a soft heart, and how choosing relentless positivity and dark humor can light up even the darkest hospital rooms. 

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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Full of great kōrero about the areas of life where we find ourselves in the grey - significant health diagnosis, neurodivergence… now what?!, aging parents and more. I sit down with disruptors, survivors, songwriters and spiritual leaders. 

It’s okay to be in mid-life, just don’t attempt it alone. 😂

Join me this coming Thursday for more mayhem and magic - the brand new season is coming in hot. Hit follow on your favourite audio platform 👊 so you don’t miss out.

Can’t wait to share it with you! xx

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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.

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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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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