It was barely 10 years ago when the who's who of the art world descended en masse on Hobart, Tasmania. They were at the Australian island at the invitation of the puckish gambling billionaire art collector David Walsh, who was throwing a giant party just outside the workmanlike town where he grew up. The bash was to celebrate the opening of Walsh’s custom-built compound for his own collection, a complex he dubbed MONA, or the Museum of Old & New Art. It was a conversation-starting event: Famously fond of shock gestures, Walsh installed a jar of his father’s ashes right at the museum’s entrance, before anyone could be offended or intrigued by Greg Taylor’s sculpture series, called that most delicate four-letter-word we won't dare write, or the replication of the human digestive system, Cloaca, by Wim Delovye—though the smell from the latter wafted out far beyond the room where it was installed.
The idea that Tasmania, long considered one of Australia's most wild and natural states with its ring of coastline, lack of cities, and sweep of mountains and countryside, would one day become one of the country's leading areas of taste, would have been absurd a handful of years ago. Perhaps it was because of MONA, but this has been the decade of Tassie, as the locals call it. Under a million visitors headed to Australia's subtropical island state before 2010; by 2018, that number had increased by 30 percent with the infrastructure taking shape to suit a more high-spend traveler.
The luxury lodge Saffire Freycinet, a short drive up the east coast from Hobart, opened not long before MONA’s debut; since then, the owners of that hotel have opened Macq01, an unwieldy name for a sister spot right on the Hobart waterfront. It’s a quirky operation, with each of its 114 rooms named after a character from the history of Tasmania or Hobart, like honey-maker Taffy the Bee Man. Across the harbor in the dockside strip of Salamanca Place sits Moss, a 41-room boutique hotel spread across two buildings, both dating back more than a century. They’ve been sensitively updated, with timber-heavy rooms in natural palettes, and plenty of greenery, whether via vertical gardens or the hand-painted tiles in each bathroom. Two more five-star properties are due to open next year: the independent Elizabeth Street, and the Tasman, which will be part of Marriott’s Luxury Collection.
Beyond Hobart, the northwest town of Stanley now has a seven-room boutique hotel, the Ship Inn, whose owners took over an historic pub that shuttered almost 50 years ago and rebooted it as a gourmet guesthouse. Nearby in Launceston, Tasmania’s second biggest town, there’s now the Stillwater Seven, with seven rooms attached to the namesake restaurant, which has long been considered one of the island’s best. The entire operation is a tribute to the Tasmania, from the locally made furniture to the toiletries by Lentara. The local olive farm was renowned for its oils; co-owner Kim Seagram says she approached the farmers at the local market and simply asked if they would be open to developing toiletries, too. If you stay here, you’re granted early access to the restaurant’s kitchen before it opens, so you can chat with Seagram’s co-owner and chef, Craig Will, and hopefully sneak a few samples. The best place for a sundowner or two is the terrace which overlooks the local river,
Kim Seagram is a Canadian expat who was drawn to Tasmania by the caliber of its produce. She credits the varied microclimates here, as well as the abundant water, for that quality; they allow everything from stone fruit to delicate crops like wasabi to thrive here. Seagram also points out the island’s isolation and relative poverty, which forced early European settlers to finesse their farming methods at the outset. Even today, agricultural stipulations are stringent—all Tasmanian meat, for instance, is raised hormone-free. Seagram, who spent time in northern California in the 1970s, sees clear parallels between the two destinations. “There’s the same appreciation for what’s going onto the plate,” she says, “Food has always been cherished here.”
Rodney Dunn has long run the island’s best cooking school, the Agrarian Kitchen, in Derwent Valley, a lush spot just outside Hobart. Last year, he and his wife, Severine, opened a second site, this time a standalone showcase for their cooking, the Agrarian Kitchen Eatery. “I did say in my first cookbook that we were never opening a restaurant,” he admits. “But we wanted to be able to serve this amazing food we were growing to a wider audience.” The menu changes daily, but look for anything cooked in the wood-fired oven whether broad bean leaves or slabs of island pork. Next year, the couple plans to move the school into the same building as the restaurant, as well as creating a new, larger kitchen garden or farm which will supply produce for classes and the chefs and offer tours to guests. “It’ll help connect diners to the essence of our ethos, and it also allows us to have our home back," says Dunn. "Currently, we live where we work, at the school.”
Wine is another Tasmanian highlight. The output here is smaller than many other states, with the 200 or so vineyards producing barely 1 percent of the country’s wine. The sparkling whites, though, which form around 40 percent of the total volume, are world class. For an immersive education on that sector, head to Josef Chromy near Launceston, owned by a refugee who escaped Czechoslovakia in 1949. It has just introduced a new experience, the Art of Sparkling, where guests are taken through the entire production process before creating a bottle of their own sparkling wine. If you’d rather sit back and relax while sampling a raft of the best vintages produced here, idle at the bar of Lucinda in the heart of Hobart. Named after a Tom Waites song, it’s owned by the same pair behind the restaurant Dier Makr, another gourmet mecca; the $58 seasonal tasting menu is one of the island’s best steals.
The tony new tone to Tasmania doesn’t mean the island is no longer a mecca for outdoorsy types. Lush and heavily forested—trees cover almost half the terrain, compared with just 2 percent of the mainland—it’s a hiking paradise. Ian Johnstone runs the four-day Maria Island Walk, on the namesake scrap of land he calls “the Noah’s ark of Tasmania,” an ecological time capsule where you’re likely to spot dolphins frolicking in the waters nearby. The new Three Capes Lodge Walk takes a similar length of time, and circles around another promontory that juts into the Southern Ocean near Hobart; it includes a boat trip to a secluded cove and a hike through a silver gum forest. And of course, there’s always Bruny Island—the Tasmania of Tasmania, a 20-minute ferry ride from a dock just outside Hobart, is popular with locals on summer weekends. Come here to gorge on fresh seafood at Get Shucked Oyster Bar, local goat’s and cow’s milk cheese from Bruny Island Cheese Company, and even single malts at Bruny Island House of Whisky. Tassie has always been a golfing hub, too. The course near Bothwell is one of the oldest outside Scotland, and though it’s not a premium tee spot, it’s shot through with history. Golf lovers can pilgrimage to the Coore & Frenshaw–designed course at Barnbougle Lost Farm, on the island’s northwest.
But Tasmania transformation isn’t complete. MONA owner David Walsh has his own plans to expand. You can already book a villa or two on Moorilla Estates, the winery next to MONA’s site, but Walsh also has more ambitious plans: a 172-room hotel of his own, inspired by an inverted suspension bridge, that is currently expected to cost around $272 million, one of the priciest luxury investments in the island’s history. There’s no word on when it will open, though MONA’s current ETA is 2024. Just imagine how much further the island might grow between now and then.
