Hobart Audio Tours

Hobart was founded in 1804 as a place to send convicts who had been too troublesome even for the other convict settlements. It grew into a whaling port, then a trading city, then settled into a long, quiet semi-irrelevance as the smallest and most isolated of Australia's state capitals. Then, in 2011, David Walsh opened MONA -- the Museum of Old and New Art -- in a former quarry on the Derwent River, and everything changed. MONA is the Southern Hemisphere's largest private museum, a deliberately confrontational institution built into the sandstone cliff face, reached by ferry from the city centre, and dedicated to the proposition that art should disturb as much as it pleases. The effect on Hobart has been called the MONA effect, and it is real.

What MONA found was a city with good bones.

Salamanca Place is a row of Georgian sandstone warehouses along the waterfront that now houses galleries, restaurants, and a Saturday market. The Theatre Royal, opened in 1837, is the oldest continuously operating theatre in Australia. The Cascade Brewery has been making beer since 1824, making it the country's oldest operating brewery. Mount Wellington -- or Kunanyi, to use the Palawa name -- rises to 1,271 meters directly behind the city and wears snow for much of the year; you can drive to the summit and look down on the city and the harbor and the Derwent winding toward the sea.