Hey MONA!
Hobart, for many, is synonymous with modern art. The Museum of Old and New Art - MONA for short - is pretty famous in these parts (and famous for its certain other “parts”…but more on that later). We had decided we would set aside a few hours today to visit MONA and see what all the fuss was about, but not before we checked out Sam’s other hot tip for good Hobart coffee.
Villino was a very cool little cafe in the Hobart CBD and from the moment we stepped through the door we could see these guys were extremely serious about their coffee. Sam ordered a single origin espresso and got to choose the specific beans and type of roast he’d like. Toby went all out and ordered a V60 (for those in the know) which set him back a cool $25 and was a work of art, with exotic overtones of this and that and hints of something else reminiscent of the tropics. It was epic, according to Tobes, and he absolutely savoured it, ensuring us it was money well spent. We’ve come a long way since the old 43 bean flavour.
Attempting to book our morning tickets for MONA, we encountered a bit of a problem. The tickets are issued with specific entry times and we had planned to spend the morning there so we could spend the afternoon exploring the historic town of Richmond, where we had booked to stay tonight, but the next tickets up for grabs had a much later 2pm start. It wasn’t until we looked at the map and realised the town of Richmond was only a half hour drive away - like driving from Narrabeen to Manly - and that we decided we could just go to Richmond in the morning and flip our museum visit to the afternoon. Brilliant.
Richmond was settled in the early 1800s so by Australian standards, it is old; oozing with history and sandstone buildings. Everyone knows, a good historic Aussie town has to have: a big lolly shop, a beautiful old two storey pub with verandahs and lots of fiddly wrought iron lacework, some jam-packed antique stores and some daggy handicrafts shops where you can come away with a hand-knitted tea cosy and at least a couple of crocheted coat hangers. Richmond ticked all the boxes and then some. It even had a convict gaol. The town’s biggest claim to fame though, and the tourist”s favourite, is Richmond’s amazing stone bridge - the oldest bridge in Australia, which incidentally, celebrated its 200th birthday last year (hope they had a big cake for all those candles).
After seeing the hillside animal ‘toilet block’ yesterday, we were amused to find that Richmond, Tasmania, has its very own “Pooseum” - with the tagline: “Education about defecation- science in all its scatalogical splendour”. They may not have a dog on a tuckerbox but they do have their own bronze statue - the Defecating Dog - “Pooby-Doo”. . I’m surprised he’s not a household name. Gundagai eat your heart out.
Across the road from the Pooseum there was a beautifully kept garden maze, which looked fabulous but we decided to give it a miss for two reasons: firstly, the fact that it would’ve set us back almosst $100 as a family of 6, to take a stroll inside and secondly, with my navigational skills, I might have been in there till March. Instead, we had fun playing ‘Corn Hole’. Who knew that throwing little bean bags into wooden holes could bring out such competitive fervour in us all? Sam was the first to score but Ross took a while to get in the groove and declared that we weren’t leaving until he sunk a beanbag. There were cheers echoing around the valley and bouncing off the mountains when his little bag finally plopped into the hole.
After a mandatory visit to the chocolate shop and a sampling of the lavender icecream for Toby, we were off to find some culture at the Tasmanian museum, just slightly more famous that the Pooseum: the mighty MONA. Molly was doing the driving today and she snagged a parking spot a short walk away, down a narrow road flanked by rows of lush green grapevines. As car-hire Bruce had said, the building itself is “an architectural marvel”, built into natural rock and spiralling, Bat-Cave-like, deep underground. The rock walls are left raw on the inside and the rusted metal everywhere gives it a rustic, industrial feel. There’s no traditional path to take you through the gallery, just a labyrinth of rooms and walkways (with very low light for some reason) to explore. We initially tried to all stay together but it soon became apparent that we had different styles and, more importantly, different paces, when it came to looking around, so we split into groups - the Meanderers and the Speedsters. By the time the Speedsters were done looking around and were up enjoying the atmosphere of the wine bar, the Meanderers still had a couple of floors to explore. I’ll leave you to guess who was in each group.
The museum contains an eclectic mix of artworks, to say the least, from ancient to contemporary, to quirky, horrifying, sad, weird and some just downright confronting. There are also some designed to shock, like the wall of ceramic vaginas and the machine that, like a zoo animal, has a daily “feeding time” and produces it’s own legitimate faeces (I see a theme developing in today’s blog).
MOMA’s current ad campaign has huge posters around town displaying some of their stunningly bad 1-star reviews, which is very funny and clever. I tried to get my family members to commit to giving me their own reviews and to sum up MONA in one sentence. One of them, who wishes to remain anonymous, did say that the best part of the day was the hot chips. For the record, I loved some, and hated some, but did think they really could have done with a couple of brighter lights in there.
Tonight we are staying at the beautiful, historic Richmond Arms Hotel and we were joined by one of the kids’ friends, Braydon, who is on his own road trip around Tassie, for a a great pub feed and a game or two of pool.
