MONA exists because of mathematics and nerve. David Walsh, a Hobart local, made a fortune through professional gambling, applying statistical systems to betting, and poured that money into art. He opened a modest precursor, the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities, in 2001, then closed it in 2006 for a 75-million-dollar reinvention. The new museum opened on 21 January 2011, set within the Moorilla winery on the Berriedale peninsula. Walsh built it not as a polite civic gift but as an argument, a personal collection arranged to provoke. For Tasmanians, entry has remained free, an unusual gesture from a man who otherwise delights in unsettling his visitors. He even offers an 'Eternity Membership' that grants lifetime free admission and, fittingly for a museum obsessed with death, the right to be cremated and interred in MONA's own cemetery, so that devotees can quite literally never leave.

Walsh has said his museum circles two themes above all: sex and death. The collection, more than 1,900 works ranging from ancient Egyptian antiquities to confronting contemporary pieces, refuses easy comfort. The centrepiece of its opening was Sidney Nolan's Snake, a vast mural assembled from 1,620 small paintings, displayed publicly in Australia for the first time. Elsewhere sits Cloaca Professional, Wim Delvoye's machine that mimics the human digestive system and produces, daily, exactly what a digestive system produces. The works hang without labels and out of chronological order; instead, visitors carry a device called 'The O,' which lets them choose how to read each piece, from a plain summary to Walsh's own irreverent opinions.

MONA's appetite for controversy spilled into the courts in 2024. The museum's Ladies Lounge, an exhibition open only to women, was conceived to make men feel the exclusion that women have endured for centuries. A male visitor sued, arguing discrimination, and the legal saga that followed was pure MONA. When an early ruling demanded the space admit men, the museum converted it, briefly, into a women's toilet, and the Picasso paintings reportedly hanging inside turned out to be forgeries painted by the artist behind the exhibit. Later in 2024, a judge of the Supreme Court of Tasmania ruled the lounge could indeed exclude men, on the grounds that doing so promoted equal opportunity for a group long shut out. The artwork, in other words, won.

MONA did more than fill a building; it remade Hobart's place in the world. In 2012, Lonely Planet named the city one of its top destinations for the year ahead, citing the museum directly and comparing its pull to the Guggenheim that transformed Bilbao. The museum extends its reach beyond its galleries through two festivals: the summer Mona Foma and the winter Dark Mofo, the latter wrapping the cold city in fire, food, and avant-garde music. For a remote island capital once known mostly for its colonial past, MONA offered a startling new identity, proof that one person's obsession, set loose underground, could draw the world to the bottom of the map.