Above: Mona, the eccentric vision of David Walsh

“Don’t let them call it ‘Australia’s Bilbao,’” pleads David Walsh, the man behind Mona, an extraordinary new art museum in Tasmania. “I hate that particular piece of architectural masturbation so much. Can’t I be Laputa or Shangri-La or Arcadia, or Disneyland? Anything other than Bilbao.”

“I know it’s a reference to the economic effect on an otherwise worthless backwater, but if Gehry met his brief in any way it must have been: ‘build something so over the top that it appeals to the lowest common denominator that divides all of us.’ Like a Rocky movie: escapism. But everyone likes Casablanca or Citizen Kane too—not because they dumb us down but because they lift us up.”

From its base in the conservative city of Hobart, a former penal colony, Mona—the Museum of Old and New Art—has started to pivot the eyes of the