All four women and the MC at this sold out WORD Christchurch event on Friday night, Nici Wickes, Ali Mau, Susie Ferguson, Petra Bagust, and Stacey Morrison, have some degree of fame.
And the funny thing about fame is that it makes you think that the version of that person that you're used to seeing is what they are. The version with flattering lighting, sparkling eyes, dazzling teeth. We very rarely stop to consider that underneath the professional polish and smooth delivery there might be a very real, messy person just doing their best.
So in this context, perhaps what looks like "risk" is simply being that messy, real person. Maybe the biggest risk, on stage in front of room full of strangers, is vulnerability? Maybe it's being your most authentic self while you tell a story for approximately 12 minutes? Maybe it's telling the unshiny, unglamorous truth?
Certainly that seems to have been the shared understanding as each woman, in their own way, shared something honest and raw. As Stacey Morrison said at the conclusion of the event, it felt like a privilege to listen to them tell their stories, sometimes said through strained voices struggling not to cry, and sometimes failing.
Petra Bagust - Reformed people pleaser
First up to tell a story of risk was Petra Bagust, who it turned out had a metre long length of toilet paper shoved in her pants pocket which she pulled out at the conclusion of her 12 minutes in a lovely bit of physical comedy. Later on someone helpfully brought a box of tissues out and this would be offered at various points in the event when it seemed necessary.
But Petra was on the brink of tears from the almost the moment she stood up to speak with a tight voice, admitting that though she loves being on stage in front of a crowd it's a different matter entirely when she has to talk about herself. After some self deprecating remarks about her earlier role as "New Zealand's Christian virgin" and the fact that now that she's gone grey they'll never put her on TV again (podcasting for the win, I guess?) she got into the meat of the story, the terrible price of being perfect.
She described herself as a perfect child who was exceptionally well-behaved, was never bored, sad or lonely. For most of her life she was, she said "people-pleasing my arse off". As a recovering people pleaser myself I related to this a lot. But people pleasing is a sort of jail cell that you build for yourself. And for Bagust the cracks were beginning to show.
Following the birth of her first child she wasn't laughing or talking and she found herself in therapy where she started learning things including, it seems, boundaries; "I love random strangers but you're not my responsibility". Then came peri-menopause - Bagust no longer apologises for crying, has made peace with her rage and accepts the risk of "not saying yes to everything". She "couldn't keep all the plates spinning during peri-menopause" and now doesn't want to. For her, "coming clean involves not doing everything right". Like going public with her ADHD diagnosis last year. She was afraid of the criticism that might come with that decision, sharing something that can be seen as a weakness felt risky. But she doesn't regret it and feels like she's created a bit of space for other people to talk about it too.
Ali Mau - Furious woman
As a broadcaster and journalist Ali Mau has been a familiar face for decades, and previously part of what she calls, "TV's glamour hetero couple".
But it's her risky work, not her love life that was the topic of her kōrero. She stared with a quite from artist, Georgia O'Keefe:
"It's not enough to be nice in life. You have to have nerve."
Mau says that she wasn't particularly courageous as a child, though she did, at the age of 15, stage a walkout at school when she learned they were going to be shown an anti-abortion film. So it sounds like the seeds of something were there but it wasn't until she was in her 50s that she started to feel the rage that Bagust hinted at, in particular with relation to a certain Conservative politician and sexual harasser.
Colin Craig. She goes on to remind us who that is in case we've "erased" him from our minds. And do you know, I think I had. It was such an odd jolt of recognition to see his now infamous photo - smug features, reclining in long grass - up on the screen above the stage, I think I had purged my brain of that man.
Ali Mau had known a woman named Rachel McGregor when she was a young reporter at TVNZ so when McGregor suddenly quit as Craig's Press Secretary the day before the 2014 election, interest was certainly piqued. What followed was a decade of torment for McGregor suffering through multiple expensive court cases, health issues, and mental health issues. Incensed by Craig's ongoing use of the courts to punish the woman who rejected him*, Mau wrote "a furious op-ed" which prompted a lot of handwringing from Mediaworks' Lawyer because "litigious people will litigate". She also helped to raise $1 million to help McGregor with her legal fees.
Fury, says Mau can be fuel, "rage is what drives me and I find it really useful". And soon there was plenty of fuel to be had as in 2018 the news broke of sexual misconduct at top law firm, Russell McVeagh. Turns out, #MeToo wasn't just an American phenomenon (because why would it be?). Mau decided that there were likely more examples of this kind of misconduct and sexual harrassment in Aotearoa and proposed to Stuff head, Sinead Boucher, an investigative project to uncover these stories. Mau admits that she was "a bit naive and completely cluess", not expecting the backlash that she got - from political cartoonists to radio opinionists like Mike Hosking, the project was portrayed as a witch-hunt, and "McCarthyism". But the larger point was that it was obviously needed - within 48 hours they had 100 emails from victims of sexual harrassment. Taking the risk paid off but these investigations were difficult and expensive - Mau recounts looking, at the request of Stuff's lawyers, through 137 pages of "sexts" during the Dr. Marisa Paterson/AUT investigation making sure the timeline they'd established, the portrayal of the power imbalance at play was unassailable. Mau admits, after a question from fellow risky woman Nici Wickes, that days before one of their stories was due to break that she would struggle to sleep and that Saturdays before a story was published front page in the Sunday Star Times were stressful because she knew that the next day, someone's life would change, their family's lives would change. Even though they had done bad things, there was an anxiety there. This was a really interesting view into the weight that can rest on the shoulders of journalists and it's good to know that, at least in Mau's case, the sense of responsibility is felt so strongly.
Mau is incredibly proud of this work but after 5 years of doing it, nothing significant had changed. Reporting levels for sexual assault were still depressingly low (7%) so she has spent the last 2 years co-founding a charity, Tika, that brings together victims of the same abuser and offers legal support, trying to break down some of the barriers that prevent abusers from being prosecuted.
She characterises turning 50 as like crossing the Rubicon - "you look inside your bag of f***s and find it empty". I felt this, Ali. I think my bag is similarly unencumbered.
Nici Wickes - Finder of happiness
Food writer, author and broadcaster, Nici Wickes, claims she doesn't feel like a risk-taker but as she rattles off the various educational and employment pivots she has taken in her life it's hard not to get a picture of a person who doesn't necessarily feel the same level of trepidation about these things as some do. Backpacking around the Far North, starting a paper-making business, even travelling from Auckland down to Otago for uni at 17 (and a half!) years old would be plenty intimidating undertakings for some of us.
Up until about the age of 30 she admits to a life that involved "a lot of drunkardness and drama... lurching from one drama to the next". The thing that felt like the riskiest thing in her life was sitting outside a house one hot January day waiting to go into her first counselling session. She felt, she says, like she was "going mad". She couldn't understand why her outside wasn't matching the inside, and in those days counselling wasn't very common and everything was telling her NOT to go in. The telling of this is clearly very affecting for Wickes who has to pause, her voice increasingly choked by emotion. But she did go in and was told that she wasn't going mad. The counsellor suggested that her problem might be loneliness. Wickes was "awash with relief". She ate strawberries on the beach, and a little tiny crack of space opened up for her. "I'm okay" she said to herself over and over.
She had a good job in the corporate world but was crushed on the inside, so she ditched the job to find happiness and came to Christchurch for 4 months for chef school and she did find happiness in that. Still, she didn't really want to be a chef so went back to the corporate world for a time but then auditioned for a cooking show. However she hadn't realised the audition was in the form of making an omelette and she's "weird about eggs" so took the risk of going off script and making a Spanish tortilla instead - she nailed it and before she knew it she was travelling the world for 4 years making a show about food. Wickes casts herself as an unlikely star because she can't walk in heels, doesn't shave her legs, or wear makeup but there's no denying there's a charisma and vivaciousness about her that more than makes up for these supposed deficiencies.
About her books, Wickes says that they are "self-help books disguised as recipe books". She has a manifesto, she says, of "talking about the things inside me".
Susie Ferguson - Battlefield survivor
Susie Ferguson's voice is a familiar one to Radio New Zealand listeners. Her memoir, Bloody Minded is described as "a memoir of womanhood" and we certainly go a taste of that at this event. Very early on she greases up the audience by saying that Te Wai Pounamu is "the best island, in my view". She didn't need to flatter us... but it does feel nice especially in those soothing, Scottish tones.
But things are not going to stay soothing. Because we're off to war, or Susie is. At the age of 25 she became a war correspondent in Iraq. She had intended to be an arts reporter. "You take your best risks when you have no idea what you're in for," she says. She lived in a tank-like military vehicle with 3 soldiers, rolling into Basra with the British Army - "everything about war is awful". There are more tears at this point, and the tissues that came out earlier are manoeuvred in her direction.
Upon her return to Britain she could not adjust to normal life, comparing herself to Jeremy Renner's character in the movie, The Hurt Locker. "Because nothing," she says, "mattered any more - everything was inconsequential". Despite the stress, anxiety, PTSD and so on she did it for 6 years. She kept going because it was the only place she felt competent. She might have a panic attack about being late for an appointment, for instance, but in Afghanistan she had the ability to stay calm in incredibly stressful situations. She could keep talking through an earthquake, she explains, but couldn't hold her life together. And it feels as if these are the risks she's going to tell us about, but "that's not actually the story I wanted to tell..."
And everything pivots and it's a different conflict entirely that we will be drawn into, this one in the field of war known as the maternity ward.
"The thing about risk is, you never know when it will creep up on you."
Susie had 2 miscarriages before she had her first child and made the assumption that she'd made it past those landmines but all was not well after the birth - "people say you geta rush of love... and I didn't". This can be a really hard thing to admit as a mother so this is an incredibly brave thing to cop to - it simply doesn't always work that way (it didn't for me either). Her baby slept for 11 hours. Having been assured that he would wake up when he needed feeding she had just let him sleep, prompting hospital staff to say "if you're not going to feed him we will". You can feel the audience's horror at what a callous and accusatory a thing this is to say to someone who's just given birth, to a first time mother.
Her baby continued to lose weight and at 9 days old she was advised to bring him into hospital the next day, but in the meantime she started haemorrhaging badly - Ferguson paints quite the picture of her father coming upon the scene in the bathroom and being able to see the whites of his eyes (he had been a former army medic so had seen a fair amount of blood in his time) - she was taken to ED. It turned out that some of her placenta was still inside her and this can cause life-threatening bleeding. Failing to deliver all of the placenta can also inhibit the body's ability to produce breastmilk.
The following day when her child was brought in as per the instructions given by the physician there was another round of accusations, "why the hell was this child not brought in last night?". She was told her son was going to be damaged because of this.
They were put on a strict feeding regime. Ferguson says she was "watched like a hawk". Formula saved her. "Breast is best" - sure, "but then there's the rest of us too". She was "made to feel like a monster".
"Sometimes you don't know that you're taking the biggest risk of your life until you're in the middle of it."
This was all clearly very painful for Ferguson to recount, and honestly pretty painful to listen to. I feel like invisible waves of empathy were washing over Ferguson, and actually all of the risky women on stage.
As Morrison said early on in the piece, "It's a dumb hui if no one cries". I guess because nothing truly meaningful has been imparted. No weak spots have been revealed. But humans connect so much more when we trust enough to open up a crack.
Risky, but worth it.
More WORD Christchurch
- WORD Christchurch website
- Follow WORD Christchurch on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok
- Our WORD Christchurch 2025 page - Find books by writers coming to this year's festival
- Photos taken during WORD Christchurch 2025
*This is loser energy, guys. Don't do this.
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