MONA (Museum of Old and New Art)

What MONA actually is

MONA — the Museum of Old and New Art — is a private art museum on Hobart's Berriedale peninsula, a short trip up the Derwent River from the city centre. It opened on 21 January 2011, funded entirely by David Walsh, a Tasmanian-born professional gambler who built his fortune through mathematically driven betting systems and poured a substantial part of it into both an extensive private art collection and a museum genuinely unlike anything else in the country to house it. Walsh has described his own creation as a "subversive adult Disneyland" — a fair summary of a museum that treats visitor delight and genuine provocation as equally valid goals, rather than picking one.

It's worth being clear early on about what kind of institution this actually is: MONA is entirely privately owned and funded, run more like a personal project than a publicly accountable civic gallery, and that distinction shows up in everything from the collection's tone to the fact that it can change direction, close a wing, or add a new provocation without the layers of committee approval a state-funded museum would need. That independence is a large part of why MONA feels so different from anywhere else — there's no board of a national government softening the edges.

By most measures MONA is the largest privately funded museum in the Southern Hemisphere, and it draws visitors to Tasmania on its own merits — for a genuinely significant share of people who book a trip to Hobart, MONA is the specific reason, not an add-on to a wider Tasmania itinerary. That's a fairly remarkable position for a museum barely into its second decade to hold, and it says as much about how deliberately different MONA is from a standard state gallery as it does about Walsh's collection itself.

Walsh's own story is worth knowing, since it explains a lot about the museum's tone. Born in 1961 and raised in Glenorchy, a working-class Hobart suburb, he built his fortune with fellow Tasmanian Zeljko Ranogajec through a betting syndicate that applied statistical modelling and card-counting techniques to horse racing and casino games, turning over genuinely enormous sums over several decades. Walsh has always been fairly candid that he built MONA at least partly to spend that money on something he found interesting rather than as a conventional philanthropic gesture — which tracks with a museum that treats provocation as a legitimate goal in its own right rather than an accident of the collection.

Built into a sandstone riverbank, not on top of it

The single most distinctive thing about MONA, before you've seen a single artwork, is the building itself. Rather than sitting above ground like a conventional museum, MONA is carved directly into the sandstone cliff face of the Berriedale peninsula, spread across three subterranean levels connected by a dramatic corten-steel spiral staircase, alongside a glass lift for visitors who'd rather skip the stairs. Architect Nonda Katsalidis designed the museum so that natural light filters down from strategic openings above, rather than relying purely on artificial gallery lighting — a genuinely unusual approach for a building that's mostly underground.

The construction itself was a serious feat of excavation: tens of thousands of tonnes of earth and sandstone were carved away from the riverside to create the museum's footprint, exposing a long stretch of sandstone cliff face — reportedly running to several hundred metres — that now forms part of the gallery walls themselves rather than being covered up. The effect on arrival is genuinely disorienting in a good way — you don't walk up steps into a grand foyer the way you would at most art museums; you descend into the rock, and the geology of the site becomes as much a part of the experience as anything hanging on the walls.

Above ground, the museum is easy to miss entirely from a distance — two heritage-listed Roy Grounds-designed villas from the original Moorilla estate sit at surface level, giving little hint of the three levels of gallery space carved into the peninsula beneath them. That deliberate understatement from the outside, followed by the sheer scale once you're underground, is very much the point: MONA wants the descent itself to feel like part of the artwork, not just a way of getting to it.

Before MONA — the Museum of Antiquities

MONA wasn't Walsh's first attempt at a museum on this site. In 2001, he opened the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities on the same Berriedale peninsula, a smaller private collection built around ancient Egyptian, Roman and other antiquities. It closed in 2006 as Walsh committed to a far larger undertaking — a reported outlay well into the tens of millions of dollars — that would eventually reopen, in January 2011, as MONA proper. The five-year gap between closure and reopening is a useful reminder that MONA wasn't a quick renovation of an existing gallery but a genuinely ground-up rebuild, both architecturally and in ambition.

Getting there — the MONA ROMA ferry

Most visitors reach MONA aboard the MONA ROMA, a fast catamaran ferry service that departs from Brooke Street Pier on Hobart's waterfront and heads up the Derwent River to the museum's own dock on the Berriedale peninsula. It's a genuinely scenic trip in its own right — river views, the city receding behind you, and an arrival by water that sets up the whole visit differently from simply pulling into a car park.

It's not the only way to get there — MONA is also reachable by road, with on-site parking for visitors who'd rather drive, and by regular public bus from central Hobart for a cheaper if less scenic option — but the ferry has become such a defining part of how people experience MONA that it's worth building into the day even if a car would technically be quicker. Either way, it's worth allowing plenty of time: between the journey, the collection itself and the museum's other on-site attractions, most visitors find MONA fills a genuine half-day at minimum, and it's easy to lose an entire day there without noticing.

The ferry itself doesn't exactly play it safe on design, in keeping with everything else about MONA — the vessel's exterior wears a deliberately provocative military-style camouflage paint job, and the rear deck seating includes a handful of fibreglass sheep among the regular seats, genuinely popular enough that visitors angle for them. A graffiti-lined stairwell and an upper-deck bar carry the same irreverent tone through to the interior, so the twenty- to thirty-minute river crossing ends up feeling less like a transfer and more like the opening exhibit.

The collection and its reputation

MONA's collection spans ancient, modern and contemporary art from Walsh's own private holdings, numbering well into the thousands of works and rotating through the museum's galleries rather than being displayed as one fixed, permanent hang. What sets it apart from a conventional museum isn't just the scale, though — it's the deliberate lack of the usual curatorial scaffolding. There's little in the way of chronological ordering, wall text explaining an artwork's historical significance, or the polite hush of a standard state gallery; instead, MONA leans into themes of sex and death across the collection, arranges works to provoke a reaction rather than deliver a lesson, and trusts visitors to form their own view before reading anything about what they're looking at.

That approach has made MONA something of a lightning rod since it opened — genuinely divisive in a way most museums actively avoid being, and entirely on purpose. Some visitors find it exhilarating precisely because it doesn't behave like a normal museum; others find specific works confronting, which is more or less the point rather than an accident. It's worth going in expecting a museum that wants a reaction, rather than one aiming for polite appreciation — and worth knowing that some galleries and works carry content warnings for exactly that reason.

One work gives a genuine sense of the collection's scale and ambition: MONA was purpose-built with a cavernous space to house Sidney Nolan's Snake, a monumental mural made up of 1,620 individual panels arranged together into the form of a giant serpent, shown publicly in Australia for the first time as part of the museum's 2011 opening. It's one of the largest works of its kind in the country, and a reasonable place to start if the museum's underground, wall-text-free layout leaves you unsure where to begin.

The O

MONA famously does away with conventional wall labels almost entirely, and in their place gives every visitor a handheld device — or, these days, more commonly a phone app — called The O. Using location awareness, The O identifies which artwork you're standing in front of and serves up information about it on demand: background, commentary, and often Walsh's own irreverent or deliberately opinionated take, alongside the option to simply mark whether you "love" or "hate" a given piece as you move through the museum.

It's a genuinely useful piece of design beyond the novelty — The O also shows what's nearby beyond the art itself (food, drink, live performances elsewhere on-site), supports accessibility features including screen-reader compatibility, and lets visitors save their visit to review everything they looked at once they're home. It's as close as MONA gets to a conventional museum guide, and it's worth using rather than skipping, since a lot of the collection's context and Walsh's own editorial voice live specifically inside it rather than on the walls.

Dark Mofo, MONA's midwinter festival

MONA also runs Dark Mofo, an annual midwinter arts and culture festival that takes over Hobart each year with fire, live music, art installations and a deliberately nocturnal, ritualistic feel that leans into Tasmania's genuinely cold, dark winter rather than fighting it. Dark Park, an interactive public art precinct usually set up in a disused industrial site, and Winter Feast — nightly communal outdoor dining around open fires — are among its best-known fixtures, alongside a program of international musicians and artists performing at venues across the city.

The festival's best-known ritual is the burning of a large sculptural effigy — inspired by the Balinese ogoh-ogoh tradition and representing an endangered Tasmanian species each year — as its symbolic close around the winter solstice. Exact dates shift annually, so it's worth checking MONA's own program before building a trip around it, but the broader pattern is consistent: Dark Mofo runs across roughly two weeks in Tasmania's coldest month, June, and has become as much a reason to visit Hobart in winter as MONA itself is a reason to visit at any time of year.

MONA also ran a summer companion event, Mona Foma (an acronym for Museum of Old and New Art: Festival of Music and Art), from 2009 until it concluded in 2024 — worth mentioning mainly so you don't go looking for it and assume you've missed the dates; Dark Mofo remains the standing, ongoing festival tied to the museum today.

Moorilla, Moo Brew, and the rest of the site

MONA sits within the Moorilla estate, a vineyard originally planted in the late 1950s by Claudio Alcorso, an Italian émigré and patron of the arts, and later bought by David Walsh — who kept the winery running, rebuilt it as part of MONA's construction, and used the same site to eventually build the museum itself. Moorilla's cool-climate wines are still produced on-site today, alongside Moo Brew, a beer label MONA launched in the mid-2000s that's since become a genuine fixture of the Tasmanian craft beer scene in its own right.

Beyond the galleries, the museum grounds include restaurants, bars and accommodation woven into the same peninsula, along with a sculpture-dotted outdoor space that's worth wandering even if you've already spent hours underground. On-site accommodation, styled as a set of architecturally distinctive pavilions overlooking the river, lets visitors stay the night right on the museum grounds rather than heading back to Hobart — a genuinely different way to experience the site once the day-trip crowds have thinned out, for anyone wanting to build a slower, overnight visit rather than a single day trip. There's also a tennis court on the grounds, of all things, alongside the winery and gallery buildings — a small, deliberately incongruous detail that fits MONA's general refusal to behave like a conventional cultural institution.

It all adds up to something closer to a destination than a single attraction — genuinely easy to lose the better part of a day to, between the art, the wine and the setting itself, and worth approaching that way rather than as a quick stop on a longer Hobart checklist.

Who it suits, and what to expect

MONA isn't a natural fit for every traveller, and it's worth being honest about that rather than assuming universal appeal. Visitors who enjoy being challenged, who like a museum with a strong point of view, or who simply want to see something genuinely unlike any other art institution in the country tend to come away exhilarated. Visitors expecting a conventional, family-friendly civic gallery — or who'd rather not encounter confronting content around sex and death — should go in with realistic expectations, or check current content advisories before booking, particularly if travelling with children.

That said, MONA isn't wall-to-wall shock value either; the collection spans quiet, contemplative pieces alongside its more provocative works, and a lot of the museum's reputation is, honestly, a little overstated by visitors retelling their most surprising moment rather than describing the full visit. Going in with curiosity rather than a fixed expectation either way is probably the most useful advice this guide can offer.

It's also worth saying plainly that MONA works for a far broader range of visitors than its reputation might suggest — plenty of families, older travellers and first-time gallery-goers who've never sought out contemporary art before come away as enthusiastic as the art-world regulars, precisely because the museum doesn't assume prior knowledge or gatekeep its own collection behind academic wall text. The lack of conventional curatorial signposting cuts both ways: intimidating if you're expecting hand-holding, genuinely liberating if you're happy to just react to what's in front of you.

For an Australia trip more broadly, MONA is worth flagging as a genuine outlier on this whole site's itinerary suggestions — most of what's covered elsewhere leans toward beaches, wildlife and open landscapes, and MONA is the rare entry that's entirely indoors, entirely about contemporary culture, and entirely unaffected by weather. It's a legitimate answer to a rainy Hobart day, and just as legitimate a reason to plan a trip around in its own right.

Planning a MONA visit

MONA operates on a ticketed, book-ahead basis, and Tasmanian residents are generally offered free general admission as a standing arrangement — a deliberate policy on Walsh's part to keep the museum genuinely accessible to the local community that hosts it, rather than pricing locals out of their own landmark. Visitors from elsewhere pay a standard admission fee; specific current pricing and opening days are best checked directly with MONA before you go; both shift from time to time and aren't worth quoting as a fixed fact here.

The honest planning advice is to treat MONA as a genuine centrepiece of a Hobart visit rather than a half-day excursion squeezed between other sights — book the ferry crossing with time to spare, allow several hours once you're there, and don't be surprised if a "quick look" turns into most of a day. Combined with Salamanca Market, Battery Point and the kunanyi/Mount Wellington summit drive, MONA rounds out what most visitors treat as the essential Hobart list.

A few practical notes worth flagging without pinning them to numbers that will date: the collection rotates, so a repeat visit some years apart can be a genuinely different experience rather than a rerun; downloading The O app in advance, or arriving early enough to collect a device, is worth doing before you start wandering rather than midway through; and because MONA sits a genuine trip from central Hobart, it's worth checking the current ferry or road travel time before locking in a same-day return flight or onward booking.