Petra Bagust
speaker
3,300 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3 Jun
Petra Bagust’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.
Appearances
He was a radio operator and got to jump out of planes and build a school in Singapore.
Yeah, it was a very formative part of his life as a young man.
And you went into the Territorials.
Can you talk to me a little bit about that or the role of the Territorials in your life and your childhood?
Yeah, so in many respects, my father had left the territories before I was of an age where I probably really understood how much impact it had had on him.
So if I reflect on him, you know, he was a man of his generation, born in the late 1930s.
Father went away to war for two years.
He came from Onga Onga, a very small community in Hawke's Bay, central Southern Hawke's Bay.
His mother ran the small dairy farm that they owned by herself while his father was away.
And his father was a bit of a stranger when he came back.
I think my father was about...
He was probably around seven or eight, but he'd grown up around women.
His mother and his grandmother, who lived nearby, boarded at Danny Burke Boys High, left at the end of what was then fifth form with school certificate, became a mechanic.
I've got his old school reports from Onga Onga School and he was no, well he wasn't regarded as an academic but he was clearly a really, really smart person and one of the things he did was his compulsory military training which he disliked intensely.
but then decided to stay and join the Territorials and made his way up through the ranks and finished up as a Lieutenant Colonel, which in the Territorials in New Zealand is quite a senior rank, so he commanded an infantry battalion and I guess, and he also achieved in his own career, he became the Chief Executive of Mitsubishi Motors New Zealand, having been a mechanic, a shop floor mechanic.
And I'd make an observation.
He was a product of his upbringing.
He was quite stern.
And I know that even our friends or my parents' friends were quite sort of wary of him because he could be quite severe at times.
And the other observation I'd make is I think that was more just a product of his time and his upbringing because when he had grandchildren, he became a different person.
Showing 221–240 of 3,300 · page 12 of 165
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