Australian multi-millionaire gambler David Walsh spending his winnings to bring art to the people
UNSATISFIED by the millions he made as an international gambler, David Walsh created a legacy in the form of MONA, a revolutionary museum in his home town of Hobart.
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UNSATISFIED by the millions he made as an international gambler, David Walsh created a legacy in the form of MONA, a revolutionary museum in his home town of Hobart. Here, the art patron talks money, love and morality.
I started writing this book because the last book sold enough copies to make some money.
People wanted to spend money on my book because of MONA (Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art), the museum I built.
A number of people, enthused after exploration and toxication, have cornered me on the stairs and told me MONA is a marvel among museums.
They talk about seeing in a way they haven’t before, or the shock of the old, or the refreshing freedom to form opinions unjaundiced by institutionalised certainty.
Just recently an American tourist told me he had been to many museums around the world and “MONA is, by far, the best.” That’s gratifying, of course, but to me it’s also gratuitous garbage.
MONA isn’t even the best museum starting with M.
There’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its intense survey of all that is worthy and western, and not only western.
The Met is also over-endowed with wonders from the rest of the world.
And there’s MoMA, its status as a bastion of modern art so assured that we riffed (ripped) off its name.
The museum has attracted a great deal of attention.
It is, however, what the marketers call a loss leader.
It’s a very good loss leader because it loses a great deal of money.
So I piqued your interest by burning cash and now I’m cashing in.
To pay for the ongoing costs of MONA and make enough money to make it a good investment, I need to sell many copies. Many, many copies.
Argument, advocacy or self-justification? Wherein I attempt to conclude the thing I do well is ethical, as would a contract killer.
I didn’t begin gambling as a winner.
My first bets were with my dad on greyhound racing and we were betting like everybody else, deluding ourselves that our judgement was superior to other aficionados of the doggies, and paying a price for our ignorance.
I became a winner, mostly through having the good fortune to meet people who understood the principles involved in getting an edge.
It seems to me that the application of skill, in an environment where skill is acknowledged, is completely appropriate.
All betting markets are constantly improving in efficiency.
It’s not morally wrong to improve the quality of your punting.
In fact, if you can do so, it would be foolish not to.
Another facet of this rather flawed gem that made me wealthy.
Gambling, like futures-market trading, doesn’t produce anything, it just causes money to change hands. It’s a zero-sum game.
Building, or scientific research, or delivering babies, or prostitution, or almost anything else short of drug dealing, leaves a record in a place, or in a mind, of something worthwhile.
Winning gamblers, however, end up with money but have achieved nothing else.
This unsatisfying scenario may have contributed to me wanting to do something with my cash, and MONA might be that something.
It’s fair to argue I built MONA to absolve myself from feeling guilty about making money without making a mark.
Tax. Wherein I tell of my only ‘gainful’ employment, a short stint at the Australian Taxation Office that prepared me for a life of leisure.
Recently I’ve had a few issues with the ATO, or to be more precise, they’ve had a few with me.
It’d be fairly foolish to push the point and piss the people at the Australian Taxation Office off more than they already are.
Let me declare, early on, my left leanings.
I’m a supporter of high-taxing regimes. I think the rich should carry the burden of social services disproportionately.
I made my money gambling, and the ATO hasn’t previously taxed gamblers.
But if I think high-income earners should be taxed heavily, why would I whine about the tax department trying to get a few bucks? Well, a retrospective decision that contravenes all previous assessments in Australia (and, probably, the British Commonwealth) and contradicts previous decisions in relation to us seems unjust, and more than a tad churlish.
We settled our dispute and the outcome seems honourable.
I say that because everybody seems equally annoyed.
A significant irony exists here, because I’ve only ever had one job as an adult, and that was with the tax department.
It was towards the end of 1979, I’d just turned 18 and discovered gambling and alcohol – the former was being hindered by the latter.
One day I served a woman with armloads of kids.
She said, approximately, “We are poor and struggling to bring up our kids. You sent us this bill and we can’t pay. How could you do this to us?”
I got the file and, sure enough, they had claimed a rebate even though she was working.
Guilty.
I didn’t understand how she expected me to help her.
I said, “You won’t hear from us again,” and tore up the file.
This was very naughty indeed, and I realised I had to get out of the public service or I might end up in jail.
Wives and girlfriends. Wherein I fail to decode the mystery that love is.
There are times when I think this whole memoir thing is toxic.
If I leave friends out, will it cause them difficulty? Or if I put them in? It seems to me that someone I called girlfriend, or wife, must appear.
These relationships have shaped me and supported me and, occasionally, allowed me to grasp the elusive nature of love.
Here’s the roster, chronologically: Mary, Julie, Penny, Liz, Irena, Sally, Gillian, Tiphanie, Karen, Max, Holly, Jen (first wife), Jemma, Jackie, Emma, Kim, Shae, Kirsha (incumbent, and now wife).
I first met Kirsha at a bar in Basel, Switzerland, at a contemporary art fair.
Every year, self-congratulatory arty types like Kirsha and me congregate there, to preen and play size-of-penis games.
Kirsha’s turned out not to be very big. Kirsha was with a journalist at the bar.
He told me he worked for a magazine.
“It’s like The New York Times,” he said.
“It’s not really like The New York Times,” I said,
“I’ve heard of The New York Times.”
He went away and Kirsha and I got to know each other. Not well, though, and after a few rendezvous she went away. Our relationship proper started on my 49th birthday, when I visited her on her farm in Sonoma, California.
A list of my states of positive emotional resolution runs something like: complacent, comfortable, content, happy, satiated, ecstatic.
Most of my life I’ve been content but not happy in relationships. At least once (Kim) I’ve been happy and satiated, but not content.
I tend to start off ecstatic and move to comfortable. Once comfortable, I start to look around for alternatives that make me ecstatic and, hopefully, happy again.
I’m the issue here, I know that, but I’m trying to describe the process, not the cause.
Kirsha, when I first met her years ago, left me complacent.
After we reconnected, I’ve accrued these terminological categories gradually, with happiness appearing quickly but ecstasy and satiation arriving on the scene last.
But they’re all here now, and maybe – I hope, I think – that even despite me and my flaws, they might all be here for good.
In both senses of good. I’ve wanted to say some of the things I’m saying now for years.
But I’ve never before had a partner who could understand that the things I say don’t reflect her faults, but mine.
People look for partners who don’t want to change them, but I couldn’t write this while with a partner who accepted me as I am. And I couldn’t do it alone.
Recently I contrived to have a few of our friends present in New York while I proposed to Kirsha. The witnesses were there to help us celebrate, of course.
But also to minimise the chance of her saying no.
Whether they influenced the outcome is moot now.
After a band played a love song to which I contributed the lyrics, she marvellously improvised an operatic acceptance.
The making of MONA. Wherein I attribute blame for my building a museum.
MONA might have started when I enlisted [friend] Patrick Caplice to buy a Nigerian palace door.
He was in South Africa, playing blackjack with my money.
Just post-apartheid, in 1992, the casino system had splintered into many tiny clubs, most lacking in expertise, and thus easy pickings.
He ended up with about $20,000 more than he took in.
South African currency regulations preclude taking out the excess, so I suggested he look into purchasing a lovely Yoruba door I’d seen in a gallery in Sandton, near Johannesburg.
Weirdly, we were permitted to export art in lieu of cash.
Thus I became an art collector.
For a year or two it decorated a wall in my narrow, three-storey house.
The temperature fluctuations were dramatic; every day had winter and summer.
A visiting friend suggested I probably needed to look after it a bit better.
I started thinking about museums… Within five years, I’d moved to a new house and bought Moorilla (the winery that became the site of MONA), and bought lots of antiquities.
A junior architect who did most of the design work for the accommodation at MONA [the site includes luxe riverside pavilions, as well as cafes and bars], made two important suggestions in a conversation about expansion a year later: go underground so as to not spoil the facade of the house, and hire a top-notch architect.
He speculated that I could probably get anybody I wanted.
It’s only through the memory of this conversation that I know I was already thinking bigger.
There is an easy way, and a hard way, to get something done.
The hard way is the [20th century American philosopher] Ayn Rand way: have a vision and relentlessly pursue it.
Of course, your vision might not be valid, and you might waste your life.
And that’s what I think Rand did.
The easy way is to start small and iterate.
Imagination will only get you so far, perspiration helps, desperation is an essential tool, but iteration is the answer, at least for me.
Maybe because I’m incapable of vision, I made MONA the easy way.
While I made MONA, I didn’t know what I was making.
And I’m not sure what it is I made.
* This is an edited extract from David Walsh’s memoir, A Bone of Fact (Pan Macmillan, $55), out now.
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