There’s hard dollars that come out of it, but from a qualitative perspective, it’s about the liveability of Melbourne.

— Katrina Sedgwick

The food comes fast at Chocolate Buddha. Sedgwick was quick to order agedashi tofu, a dish of tofu lightly fried and served with grated radish, ginger and spring onion in a reassuring broth. It’s heavenly comfort food.

The other starter is nasu dengaku – eggplant baked with miso paste. It comes as individual pieces in a salad, rather than as a whole slice of eggplant basted with a thick layer of miso, as is often served in Japanese restaurants. For drinks, we stick to water.

Sedgwick is living proof of the power of public policy. She grew up in Adelaide and benefited from investments made in the South Australian arts scene by the reforming Labor premier Don Dunstan in the 1970s and ’80s. It was the time when the country’s first arts centre was built, the South Australian Film Corporation kicked off and the Adelaide Festival and the associated Adelaide Fringe festival began.

Dunstan also put money into arts education. Sedgwick, one of four children raised by a single mum, received free violin lessons at primary school and then went to Marryatville High, one of the state’s four arts-focused high schools.

“I got 10 free lessons of music a week. It was just this phenomenal gift.”

She wasn’t the only one. The same opportunities propelled other kids, fellow Adelaideans Belinda McFarlane and twin brothers Ben and Toby Lea to international music careers.

“Belinda McFarlane and Ben and Toby Lea all went to my primary school and all had free string [instrument] lessons from grade three,” Sedgwick says. “They then all got scholarships to go to Marryatville High School. Ben and Toby are in the Vienna Philharmonic – one in the violin [section] and one in viola – and Belinda is [second violin] in the London Symphony.”

Star turns

Sedgwick, whose first film role was at the age of 9 in Peter Weir’s 1997 thriller The Last Wave, built a career as an actor after leaving school.

She never went to university, but cites the time she spent with Etcetera, a theatrical troupe set up by choreographer Julia Cotton that included illusionist Russell Garbutt and a team of visual artists, composers and musicians.

“The best education I had was working for nine years with a group of amazing artists, led by Julia. We created shows; made them, staged them, and then toured them.”

There’s a lesson for project management here – hire someone from the arts world. They know how to make stuff happen with very tight budgets. “We were given a $40,000 grant, and it supported eight people plus additional staff for the next three years.” They were not full-time salaries, of course, but the troupe was adept at leveraging other work. “We had to be resourceful,” Sedgwick says.

When she realised acting was not going to work for her long term, the producing skills she acquired in the troupe led to a job at the Adelaide Festival.

By now our mains have arrived. Sedgwick’s choice is teriyaki chicken don – the easy-to-eat bowl of rice heaped with marinated chicken thigh, teriyaki sauce, oyster mushrooms, shredded nori seaweed and bountiful greenery.

Mine is the sashimi don – generous layers of raw salmon also over rice with – and this is a joy to note – a fresh shiso leaf, a pungent relative of mint and basil that is to sashimi what a marshmallow is to hot chocolate. It just makes it complete.

Both come with a side of miso soup.

Sedgwick, who with husband Chris Barker – he works for VicScreen, previously Film Victoria – has two sons aged 18 and 20, is quick to say she won’t be able to eat it all.

“Now, do you want to have a little bit of this? Do you want to have a try?” She’s still asking as she moves some of her chicken into my bowl.

Sedgwick’s first paid production gig came in 1996 when, through Adelaide Festival director Barrie Kosky, she helped produce the Red Square open air performance space on central Adelaide’s Torrens Parade Ground. The installation, created by director Nigel Jamieson and executive producer John Pinder, involved 120 rust-red shipping containers, scattered and stacked up to seven storeys high.

“We had $60,000, and three hours a night to fill – for 16 nights. We programmed everything. We got the Morris Minor club of South Australia to drive 15 cars in formation into the space. Then the windows went down and out leapt a whole lot of choristers who sang the Hallelujah chorus with three local brass bands. It was crazy, crazy stuff – and so much fun.”

That job led to another, and another, and another: as artistic director of Come Out Festival in 1999, artistic director of the 2002 Adelaide Fringe, founding director of the biennial Adelaide Film Festival, and then to the ABC where she headed up arts for three years. She returned recently to the national broadcaster as board member.

After seven years running national museum ACMI – the Australian Centre for the Moving Image – Sedgwick took on her current role in 2022.

Size matters

It doesn’t take long for us two South Australians to discuss why the experience of arts festivals in the eastern states differs from the all-consuming experience of those who grew up in Adelaide.

“There is an inherent snobbery,” Sedgwick says. “I don’t think the eastern seaboard pays as much attention as it should to the innovation that’s happening in Adelaide.”

Lest this turn into a collective eye-roll at the big eastern states, she also points out that a lot of the difference comes down to geography. Size matters, it turns out, for festival cities.

“Because it is a small city like Edinburgh, like Avignon, [the Adelaide Festival] transforms the city in a way that just doesn’t happen to the same scale in big cities,” she says. “If you’ve only attended festivals in other places, you can’t understand how transformative it is to that city.”

And that provides a segue back to the reason for our lunch – the arts precinct upgrade.

“What we have here in Melbourne is utterly unique,” she says. “It is one of the most densely populated corridors of creative and cultural activity anywhere in the world.”

That’s clear to anyone who takes a stroll south from Flinders Street Station, over the Swanston Street Bridge and past first the 2500-seat Hamer Hall, then the spire-topped theatres building that includes the State Theatre, and on to the original National Gallery of Victoria building, the 1968 Roy Grounds-designed monolith with the water wall at the entrance.

Also in the precinct are the Australian Ballet School, the Victorian College of the Arts and the ABC’s Southbank campus, Sedgwick points out – and then corrects my description of her role as a director in the greater project.

Producing the directors

“I would say I’m more of a producer, a creative producer,” she says.

The directors are those driving the individual projects for their organisations. NGV’s Tony Ellwood who oversees the building of NGV Contemporary is managing his own donors, the architect Angelo Candalepas and patrons.

Arts Centre Melbourne CEO Karen Quinlan is responsible for the massive enlargement of the theatres building – and the loading dock that goes five storeys below street level.

It’s up to Sedgwick, the producer who once learned how to stretch $40,000 for years, to keep these directors on track and make sure the $1.7 billion works for the city and its people in perpetuity.

She keeps the curtain firmly drawn on the inevitable contests for funding and hard decisions.

“People are fighting for what they need in a way that is courteous and collaborative,” she says. “Everybody understands the collective challenge is to wring value out of every single cent in this project.”

And how does she find managing the politicians?

“Well, I love it. But again, I think that’s an Adelaide thing. You know, when you work in Adelaide, in the arts, and particularly in festivals, it’s so embedded in the machinations of politics,” she says.

Melbourne is bigger, but there is a bipartisan pride in arts and creativity that spares her project from the politicking of a more conventional infrastructure project like a road or a railway, she says.

“It’s about the identity of the city,” she says. The arts play a big role in drawing visitors so “there’s hard dollars that come out of it, but from a qualitative perspective, it’s about the liveability of Melbourne”.

Work is in full swing. The theatres building is due to complete in 2027. The State Theatre is closed, full of scaffolding and with seats removed to allow the work designed by NH Architecture that will create a new 270-square-metre rehearsal studio – the same size as the main stage directly adjacent to it.

The Candalepas-designed NGV Contemporary and the huge garden, designed by architecture firm Hassell and to be called Laak Boorndap, will not be completed until late 2028 or even 2029.

Will it come together on time and on budget? Or, to put it in theatre terms, will it come right on the night?

The one-time child actor shines through as Sedgwick responds with a smile. “It always does.”