Thanks for publishing the whole article.  A very interesting read.  Yes the ‘exhibits” are something else.  What I myself found as the big part of the MONA show was the architecture, the lighting, the sounds and the people.  I went away feeling as if it hadn’t mattered what was ‘on show’, that just being in there was sensational.  A modern day catacomb.  The entrance is sensational, with its exterior’s tennis court colours melting and moving shapes, as light and warping people are reflected off shining walls.  And to think that the ATO tried to kill the goose that laid the golden egg!  And I had never understood Lindsay’s rapture when MONA was opened.  I’d visited the former Museum of Antiquities, loved it for what it was.  David Walsh had been there on his own, in a side room.  He was watching the AFL Grand Final.  He greeted me briefly, said for me to have a wander, and got back to the footy and a can of beer, if I remember correctly.  I thought he was pretty cool, for a museum proprietor.  So I’d wandered.

I went back there another time, to the M. of Antiquities.  Sadly it was shut.  I consoled myself with food and wine.  I asked ‘Was it reopening?’ and was given a date something like the ‘year after next’.  I didn’t understand.  Just as I didn’t understand the fanfare when I much later read on TT of MONA’s opening.  But I sure got the message when I finally got there last year!  We went down to Hobart just so as to see this MONA thing.  Four of us, as tourists, two Victorians and two Taswegians.  Checked out the wine-bar/grass area thingo then headed for it.  Once inside, and down deep, we four split up and explored to our individual hearts’ content.  For me, it was like a ‘Boys Own’ Adventure.  I’m so glad I immersed myself under the google headline and took my courteous admonishment from an attendant in good spirit!

For all the apparent yet supposed focus on death, sewage and destruction, I emerged triumphant and feeling very alive!  What’s more, I felt I belonged to the fabled ‘Clever’ island, to a society that was civilised, that I could hold my head up proudly and say anywhere, that I was from Tasmania.  MONA is a glimpse of our potential.  In the heart of the monamaze, I found myself.  I was looking curious, expectant and a little startled.  Richard Flanagan has elsewhere identified our state’s underbelly.  Now, in his New Yorker article, he spotlights Walsh’s Do-It-Yourself MONA sensation.  This is my Tasmania, be my Florentine.

Never been to MONA but read lots about it and David Walsh.

Given that this attraction brings in more visitors than anything in Tassie it deserves serious attention.

Conceived by an individual with rare vision and drive, MONA is an extraordinary contrast to the weaselly politicians of both Houses of Parliament and their syncophantic spin doctors, advisors and bureaucrats.

More David Walshs’ in Tasmania please!!

Thanks for publishing this. How awful to think I might have missed it.  Wonderful Flanagan observation and reportage, with a fascinating topic, was a recipe for a riveting read.

John, get yourself there, post haste. It is worth the effort and far more.
My only regret was that I waited so long.

David Walsh deserves to be aknowledged for the generosity of his gift, and for its profundity. I propose we symbolically hand him the keys to the state as a symbol of our appreciation. How we do that I have no idea, but I suspect it will mean more coming from the grass roots than from the muppetts at the top.

Without David Walsh there could never be a MONA.

There is nobody else with the imagination or the courage in Tasmania. We prefer to cut it down or dig it up, or knock it down and rebuild with stacks of concrete slabs.

Without David Walsh what we have is the calumny that is the Tahune Airwalk, or a cable car on Mt Wellington, or more taxes wasted on Bellerive Oval.

Imagine Tassie without David Walsh. Or Richard Flanagan for that matter.

Well,well! The tt glad-handers celebrate the efforts of David Walsh in collecting the work of others while ignoring a fact they have condemned in other instances, and that is that he has done it from the proceeds of GAMBLING!
They are also glad-handing the work of the writer of fiction and serial forest industry hater Richard Flanagan, who has decended like a blowfly, feasted on the efforts of others and secreted it into the pinnacle of the wankers’ digest, The New Yorker! Writing this is a poor substitute for throwing a piece of rotten fruit at him…

George (#6) does it again!
All grumpy and confused.

There’s a bit of a difference, George, between the proceeds of ones own gambling and the proceeds of other people’s gambling. Or didn’t that occur to you?

And then he (Walsh) uses these “ill gotten gains” to create a museum that is becoming, by itself, a major tourist attraction and contributing so much to our economy and cultural life (without even considering MonaFoma). Robin Hood comes to mind: robbing the rich to give to the poor.

A bit of a contrast to your beloved forest industry, George, which uses taxpayers’ money to plunder the forests, despoil the landscape and reduce biodiversity while creating division within the community and, overall, discouraging tourism.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistinism

Mr Harris you should stop judging others by your own standards. Go back to to making huon pine placemats for people who have the same lack of imagination as yourself. There is more intelligence in David Walsh’s faeces than you express. Your full of shit.

David Walsh robbed the robbers and redistributed it.  Noone suffered as a result of his gambling as opposed to the government and pokie barons. Onya David.

#8, I agree that we could have done without #6, but but we could also do without your last sentence (I’m not sure which offends me most: the first word of it or the last!)

Doug,after the faeces that aka has thrown at anyone that disagrees with his redneck and Jurassic position (ask Claire Gilmour) I reckon that I find no offense and rate James W comment as a 12 out of 10!

#8 James, I know you’re a keen student and supporter of the arts in Tasmania.  Tell me, are we looking at David Walsh’s cheekiest mobile exhibit yet: the ‘Cloaca GH’ model humanoid digestive machine?  Perhaps you could tell us why it all seems to come out of the other end on this one.

Doug, (#10), I like your style. Some fools wouldn’t know punctuation if they were to trip over it! By the way, where did I actually criticise anything David Walsh has done? I mentioned he has collected the work of others, and I know he has paid high prices for much of it, and I acknowledged he used the proceeds of gambling, but I did not make a value judgement on gambling. (I have a very occasional flutter myself, less frequently than every Melbourne Cup) However I did have a go at tt glad-handers and the dubious writer of fiction… I reckon they are fair game.
And further, I cannot actually remember posting this on tt. I know I posted it as a comment on someone’s facebook page, and maybe Pat Synge (#7) is right, I am grumpy and confused, but I wonder where Pat is going to get boat grade Celery-top Pine to meet his boat building and repair needs. If he supports the dud deal he is supporting the locking up of almost all of the Special Timbers Zone between Tarraleah and South East Cape, and any scope of harvesting CT Pine. No CT Pine has been harvested for months, and none is in prospect. How dumb is that?

Stephen, I didn’t really understand CLOACA until I saw a room full of them at the Delvoye show. It is a portrait of all of us, When I was standing in the room I realised that what was going on inside that machine was going on inside of me and the people around us. That… plus all my senses ,  thoughts, memory and consciousness.
Its about “The bride stripped bare”...so to speak.  So if you take memory, sense and conscience away , all we are left with is this shit making machine. I don’t know if that is Willem Delvoye’s intention, but its my pathetic interpretation. That we are all full of shit, but for you George , some more than others

“If he supports the dud deal” (#6)
For the record, George, I don’t.

Just because FT has an abysmal record when it comes to managing our forests this doesn’t mean that they should be “locked up” . They should be (much) better managed that’s all.

George mentions Celery Top Pine specifically and he’s right about it being a valuable boat building timber. But only if it’s allowed to grow to maturity. For years FT has been clearing mixed native forests and burning (or selling as poles for as little as $35m3!) immature CTP. This is exactly the kind of shameful waste that has led us to this ridiculous state of affairs. If our forests were well managed there would only be a few extremists to contend with not a considerable proportion of the population.

Sorry about having been drawn into this off topic discussion. I’ll shut up now and get back to work.

Re #15, I actually agree with most of what Pat is saying, and sure there has been plenty of examples of bad management in the past. I agree we shouldn’t be harvesting immature Celery-top, although some of it will never grow into premium logs no matter how long it is left. My point on this topic is that you don’t sabotage the future to punish the sins of the past. We should decide the best future management arrangements in a fair and proper manner, not by rabid campaigners using market tactics like a gun to the head.
I support the arts, in particular the opportunities for arts-based manufacturing industry afforded by access to our unique Special Timbers, but they must be managed properly. I know David Walsh supports a wide diverity of artistic expression in a wide diversity of media, but Flanagan is more selective, and I condemn the populist and petty hatreds he trots out on so many occasions.

I thought the poo machine was terrific but I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because it made me feel superior. We do all of that same chemistry in a much neater and more compact way, we are self-powering, and we get enough surplus energy out of it to go on and create things like poo machines.

All I need is a smartly-dressed young woman to feed me twice a day and I’d be better than it in all respects.

I went to MONA when I was in Tas because I’d heard so much about it. I went on the first ferry on a Sunday morning. Some things in the museum I thought were really great - the mummies, the fake mound with a little motel in it, the Aust paintings of the 40s and 50s, and the fab things by the Japanese and the felt and broken glass by Anslem Keifer was it by him? and some of the sculptures, and the water falling down the sandstone wall. But there are some real problems for visitors in getting into the museum and getting round it that I think really need to be changed. Off the ferry people who’d been there before raced up the stairs to get in the door. Those of us who were slower had to wait hundreds of hours in a queue to get in the first door. This was a real drag and if it had been raining or boiling would have been worse. Then when we got in we had to endure this spiel from the young people behind the desk about the hand held museum guide thing. I couldn’t be bothered with it but they really tried to make me take one. In the museum people were standing round trying to get the little computer things to work, spending time on that and looking at that rather than at the exhibits. My 2 friends couldn’t get them to work without a lot of fiddling, and my 75 year old sister had no chance. Also no one told us there were hundreds of steps up to the museum. That might be a nice idea to enter it like a ziggurat or something but for a 75 year old it was real hard work and there was only 1 seat half way up. No lift - a bad idea for old an infirm.
Still its fab that a Tasmanian has made this wonderful personal ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’(which is what it should have been called rather than ‘Wonderkammer’ or whatever in Flanagan’s article)
and given it to the people of Tasmania free. Its amazing to think that a person could do that and provide such a pleasurable and funny and exciting place to go to. Unfortunately for him but not surprising he has all these hangers on and arty people who suck up to him, and in a way because of them his life must be a misery. Tasmania should do something fabulous for him. I don’t know what, but a start would be to pay for its running, since its brings so many people to Hobart. There probably aren’t many stories in the history of art like this, because he came from a poor family, not the gentry, and not from a family tradition of philanthropy.
I can’t express how much I admire him and what he’s done. He is one of Australia’s greats. And Richard Flanagan is right. I think its something about Tasmania that has produced such a person. A person with such a singular vision - who has given something so wonderful to Tasmania just because he wanted to.
Going back again for sure.
Annie