MONA founder David Walsh says the museum is 'my hotted-up Torana'

As someone famously obsessed with sex and death, it makes senses the iconoclastic art patron sees his famous Hobart museum as a tool to help him 'bang above his weight'.

David Walsh chose to have lunch with the AFR at Hobart pizza and pasta joint Da Angelo's rather his own restaurant Faro – "it's too loud". Rémi Chauvin

Gabriella CoslovichSaleroom writer

Nov 27, 2020 – 9.26am

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David Walsh didn't have a clue what the restaurant scene was like in Hobart when he was growing up in the working-class suburb of Glenorchy in the 1960s and '70s.

“I didn’t go to a restaurant except for my 13th birthday,” he says. “I otherwise didn’t go to a restaurant until I was older than 18.”

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Gabriella CoslovichSaleroom writerGabriella Coslovich is an arts journalist with more than 20 years’ experience, including 15 at The Age, where she was a senior arts writer. Her book, Whiteley on Trial, on Australia’s most audacious of alleged art fraud, won a Walkley in 2018.