GEOFFREY ROBERT
New Zealand novelist
Life on the Faultline
Life on the Faultline is a down-to-earth podcast series featuring uniquely candid insights from the cancer journeys of New Zealanders. It aims to help friends and family understand how they can help or hinder the journey, the emotional rollercoaster that is cancer and the decisions that need to be traversed. It will also resonate deeply with those faced with the Big C and provides some honest feedback for our medical profession.
Sue Lancaster
Host and producer Sue Lancaster has lived with an incurable blood cancer for several years. She sat down in the living rooms of Kiwis throughout New Zealand to hear their stories. Being a fellow Big C traveller enabled her to ask the hardest questions about life and death, heartbreak and joy – share the tears and tap the laughter in a way that only those who have been there could understand.
Sue has worked as a journalist, a communications specialist, management consultant and in international development with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Participants
Sue interviewed people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, religious beliefs, geographical locations, genders, and stages of their journeys.
While Life on the Faultline highlights the experiences of people with a form of blood cancer known as myeloma and its precursors, the series is not about myeloma – it is about the insights these people bring to the Big C story.
They've faced gruelling treatments, day-on-day uncertainties, heartbreak; but also some incredible highs when good news arrived, and from truly understanding the preciousness of what many people take for granted.
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Listen to the episodes
1: RUN TOWARDS OR RUN AWAY
How people reacted when they found out a family member or friend had cancer, including advice on how the participants would have liked them to react.
2: TO KNOW OR NOT TO KNOW
The advantages and disadvantages of knowing you've got, or are likely to get, an illness that will have serious consequences.
3: HARD CONVERSATIONS
How people found out about their diagnosis from the health sector; what went well, and what could have been improved.
4: TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL
Who the participants told about their diganosis; when and why.
5: TO CHOOSE OR NOT TO CHOOSE
Navigating dying or the thought of it, including views on medically assisted dying.
The Life on the Faultline podcast series was completed by Sue Lancaster in March 2025.