Marcia Ferguson loves the Braybrook Community Gardens. Photo: Ken Irwin
What's your favourite public place?
Braybrook Community Centre and Gardens is one of my favourite places. It's a beautiful place with enormous gum trees and a huge oval. It's got a gracious old grandstand and it's like a beautiful area that no one would imagine the west ever had, tucked away in pretty Churchill Avenue.
Your favourite sign?
Marcia and her brother on her first trike.
My great-grandfather, D. B. Ferguson, was the managing director of Sunshine Harvester. They built homes for their workers and had croquet lawns and beautiful rose gardens. In his honour, a street was called after him - Ferguson Street in Sunshine. Every now and then, my family would drive to Sunshine and have a look. My family was in Sunshine, working or living there, for 100 years.
What artwork has best captured your sense of the city?
There was a group of women, Crying in Public Places, who produced beautiful shows about their experiences of growing up in the '80s and '90s. Those shows spoke so strongly to me about what I was as a person in a way that nothing else had. That ensemble understood that the ordinary is one of the most important things to acknowledge in our culture. It was a life-changing moment - not long after university - and it gave me the direction and path that I'm still on now.
Tree-planting at The Quarries Park. Photo: Arsineh Houspian
Where do you take visitors to Melbourne?
My husband is a New Zealander and I lived in Europe for a long time, so we often have visitors from overseas. We bring the entire family to The Quarries Park in Clifton Hill. We go on boat trips around the bay - it's always called going on an adventure. It has to be something we've never done before, unless it's a diehard favourite like the boat to Williamstown. Mostly, our guests are family and we love to go outdoors and to Arts House in North Melbourne to see whatever is on and be surprised.
Your favourite view?
There's the most extraordinary view from the Footscray Community Arts Centre looking through a large window across the Port of Melbourne to the cityscape of Melbourne. The centre has a space called the Roslyn Smorgon Gallery with a large window that frames this incredible view. Once we got on a night train to Sydney (one of the family's adventures) and for ages we trundled through the railway yards with all these lights and that's the kind of view you get at that window. To me, it's all about the west and where industrialisation is incredibly beautiful.
Which doorway would you most like to go through?
I'd like to walk through politicians' doorways and have some really decent conversations about pertinent issues. Australians are renowned for having really amazing bullshit detectors. The greatest gift politicians could master is to be authentic in their dealings with people. The culture of my grandparents, who were generous, charitable country people, is being left behind.
Where do you never want to go back to?
Old relationships or my teenage years, which were pretty awful. Some people can ride broken relationships or disappointments really easily and I'm not one of those. There was a big relationship in England that broke up and took a few years to get past, but then I met my future husband. As a teenager, I had a wonderful circle of friends at my school, Korowa, but I was so frustrated and bored. While I was a conscientious student, I really had no outlet for my creativity. I'm intensely involved in art and I can see it in my kids that they've got that gene, too. Those years have driven me to become the hard worker that I am, because I could never stand to go back to that state of boredom.
Your most vivid childhood memory?
I had just got my first bike - a trike - shiny red as Judy Garland's shoes (see photo). I was quite nervous riding for the first time so my brother jumped on the backboard to give me a push. His weight tipped the trike backwards and we both came crashing down. Rolls Court in Glen Waverley was a dead-end street on the edge of the city. The street was full of kids and we roamed like a pack, walking a mile to the nearest milk bar to buy a gobstopper for two cents. Dad painted a tennis court and hopscotch and wiggly lines all over our street so we could play there.
■ The Big West Festival runs from November 22 to December 1. bigwest.com.au.
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