David Walsh's Museum Transforms Tasmania's Cultural Economy

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), opened in 2011 in the former casino complex on the Berriedale peninsula above the Derwent River, has been the most significant single investment in Australian cultural tourism in a generation, transforming Hobart from a peripheral destination on the Australian arts circuit to a city that international arts travellers specifically visit for the experience of a museum that has no equivalent in the world. The museum's creator, David Walsh, the professional gambler whose card-counting expertise generated the fortune that funded MONA, has deployed that fortune in the service of a private museum whose challenging, erotic, and death-obsessed collection provides the most deliberately provocative museum experience in Australia.

MONA's economic impact on Tasmania has been measured and documented in the years since its opening, with the museum generating visitor numbers and tourism expenditure that dwarf those of any other Tasmanian cultural attraction. The museum's annual Dark MOFO winter festival, a companion event to the summer Mona Foma that precedes it, has extended MONA's cultural programming to fill the winter calendar with events of international artistic ambition that draw visitors to Tasmania in the season that traditionally saw the state's tourism economy contract.

The MONA-driven Hobart tourism surge has created the conditions for the broader cultural and hospitality economy growth that has transformed the city's food, accommodation, and arts landscape. The restaurant and café scene that has developed in Hobart's inner city and waterfront, the accommodation boutique hotel development that has expanded the visitor accommodation options, and the arts organisations that have benefited from the increased arts tourism audience have all grown in the context that MONA created.

Walsh's ongoing investment in the MONA complex, including new building additions, the cellar and vineyard that produce the Moorilla wines served in the museum, and the extraordinary residential accommodation of the Museum Pavilions, continues to expand the museum's offer and to reinforce its position as a destination of the first order for art travellers who have seen the world's major collections and are seeking something genuinely unlike them.