LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: In the past three years, Tasmania has firmly landed on the map of the international arts community and it's largely thanks to one man and his extensive gambling.

David Walsh is the driving force behind MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art.

It's winning raves overseas and boosting the local Hobart economy, thanks to a huge growth in tourism.

Mr Walsh is a Tasmanian native who's made hundreds of millions of dollars gambling.

He made a humble start with a friend at the Wrest Point Casino and is now part of a massive, international syndicate using complicated probability and statistics models to beat the odds.

He says MONA is his gift to the community, a way of assuaging his guilt over making so much money gambling, an activity he calls immoral.

David Walsh has just written a memoir called A Bone of Fact where he writes with extraordinary frankness about everything from sex to gambling to death.

I went to Hobart to visit David Walsh, who almost never gives interviews, and has certainly never spoken in this much detail about his gambling.

DAVID WALSH, MONA FOUNDER: Leigh! What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?

LEIGH SALES: David Walsh, fancy meeting you here in this not-at-all-contrived opening sequence for our story. I've just been admiring your Sidney Nolan.

DAVID WALSH: I admire it sometimes too. I particularly admire this bit of it with the beautiful immediate elucidations of the bats, which progress from down here superbly. I think that he started at this end and I think he ended at that end and it looks like he got better. There's 1,600 panels. You obviously need to build a building to put it in.

LEIGH SALES: Yeah, right.

DAVID WALSH: So, no-one's ever seen it in Australia before we put it in here.

LEIGH SALES: Well where was it before you got it?

DAVID WALSH: It was in a warehouse in London.

LEIGH SALES: So is it about for you what looks good on the wall or is it - like, what do you consider to be art, I suppose? If that's not too broad a question. I mean, I know it is a very broad question.

DAVID WALSH: It's a pretty broad question, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter if it's art. If I had a nice piece of technology that said something, I would subvert its purpose and put it on display. In fact, Car's close to that, which you can see a glimpse of up there.

LEIGH SALES: Yeah, right.

DAVID WALSH: But, I actually don't see this as an art gallery. I think it's a gallery of concrete philosophy, shall we say. It's ...

LEIGH SALES: So you want stuff that says something, that challenges people?

DAVID WALSH: Well, I don't think Rembrandt is the driver here. I think Immanuel Kant might be.

LEIGH SALES: Has MONA turned out as you had envisaged?

DAVID WALSH: I was prepared to meddle as I went along. So, I started with a much smaller idea. But, essentially, yes. The ideas that I think I had seem to be represented here. But the response to MONA has been bigger than - has been overwhelming and I didn't expect it to be.

LEIGH SALES: You write in your new memoir that, "It's fair to argue I built MONA to absolve myself from feeling guilty about making money without making a mark." Why did you feel guilty about that?

DAVID WALSH: Well, I made my money gambling. It's a zero-sum game. Like some aspects of the stockmarket, if someone wins, someone loses. So ... I'm not - you know, prior to building MONA, I hadn't built any nice buildings, I hadn't done anything that the community could benefit from and thus that I could be proud of.

LEIGH SALES: If you're smart enough to have worked out how to play the system, then why should you be guilty?

DAVID WALSH: That's fair enough. You should be a gambler. You obviously have no moral whatsoever.

LEIGH SALES: (Laughs) Do you see gambling as something that is a moral or an immoral activity?

DAVID WALSH: Yes, I think it's mostly immoral, from the point of view of the service provider and I think poker machines are an abomination. ...

... These are incense ashes. And this is a mould for them, so ...

LEIGH SALES: Oh, right.

DAVID WALSH: So that was taken apart, filled up with the ashes, and that was taken, placed over there and the idea is in the - you know, the sort of Buddhist cosmology, everything falls apart. This was meant to fall apart, but our gallery attendants that patted down the ashes were a little bit too good at their job and it's held together a lot longer than anyone expected. So it lasted - in Berlin is lasted a matter of weeks, and here it's lasted - must be nine months now.

LEIGH SALES: What gives you more of a buzz: art or gambling?

DAVID WALSH: I get no buzz out of gambling at all.

LEIGH SALES: Has that always been the case or just now?

DAVID WALSH: Oh, I'm pretty sure that the answer is yes, but I suspect that it's no. And what I mean by that is my memory is that gambling's always been pretty level for me, but I can't believe that's true, 'cause I must've started somewhere.

LEIGH SALES: Somebody might look at your life and say, "Wow, look at how successful he's been gambling. That's a good life choice."

DAVID WALSH: Yeah, it's - a very poor life choice.

LEIGH SALES: It hasn't been for you, though.

DAVID WALSH: I talk about in the book- an analogy I used once before is imagine everyone in the world tossed a coin, so you divide the world's population into two halves. And they toss a coin in pairs and then you eliminate half of them. So, say you start with $1,000. Now you've got half of the world with $2,000 and the other half with no money. And you do it again and again and again. And you've got a bunch of people with $4,000, then $8,000, then $16,000, then $32,000, then $64,000. And after you do it around about 27 times, you're left with one person who's got all the money in the world and they've just been lucky. Now, if you ask them, they're going to say, "I'm really good at tossing coins." The asymmetry is, if you ask all the losers, they will simply say, "I was just unlucky."

LEIGH SALES: How much of your own success in life has been due to luck and how much of it has been due to your own skill and your own decision-making?

DAVID WALSH: You can't really work it out in an individual case 'cause it's a statistical argument. But, you know, most of it, most of it.

LEIGH SALES: Most of it's luck or most of it's ... ?

DAVID WALSH: Most of it is luck. The luckiest bit was being born in the first place, having the thrill of wandering around aimlessly getting rich. But, I made all sorts of bad decisions. And, I dropped out of uni to be a gambler. How many people that drop out of uni do OK? Quite a few. How many that drop out to be gamblers do OK? I don't know of too many. ...

... These people that want to live forever confuse and disgust me. I just think we do what we can do and get out of the way for something else or someone else.

LEIGH SALES: Do you fear death?

DAVID WALSH: At risk of seeming morbid, I sometimes find it attractive. I just think that there'll be a time when the time has come and that time has within it the reality of having existed and that's an enormous privilege. ...

... There's a myth that I have some deep knowledge. I mean, I have vague skills and if you do something for 35 years, you get reasonably good at it. But even in my class at uni, there are people that were a lot more skilled than me. But, you know, they're probably doing worthwhile things like working at the Tax Office.

LEIGH SALES: Speaking of the Tax Office, that was your first and only job?

DAVID WALSH: I worked as a cleaner a lot, but it was the only nine-to-five job I ever had. It wasn't nine to five because they had a wonderful thing called flextime which meant you could leave the casino when the casino shut and turn up immediately.

LEIGH SALES: What was it like straddling those two worlds, all night at the casino and all day at the Tax Office?

DAVID WALSH: It was probably the most fun I ever had. But I suspect I wasn't the greatest Tax Office-er - Tax Officer - that was ever employed by them. They - I only lasted, I don't know, three or five months or something - I can't remember exactly, but ...

LEIGH SALES: How much were you earning at the Tax Office?

DAVID WALSH: I think, because I remember betting $100 of Zeljko's money at a hand of blackjack, I remember thinking, "That's a dollar more than I earn," so I think I was being paid $99 a week.

LEIGH SALES: Does it make money now, the gallery?

DAVID WALSH: No, it gets lauded. Yeah, it costs something over $10 million a year to run and the income's something like $4 million a year. ...

... There's plenty of opportunity. This is the exact opposite of your standard business plan. I built something and now I'm trying to work out how to make it work rather than working out how to make it work before you build it.

LEIGH SALES: You write in the book a bit about art wankers. What do you mean by art wankery?

DAVID WALSH: The exact sort of stuff that I was just talking. So ...

LEIGH SALES: So are you an art wanker?

DAVID WALSH: Well I was for a moment.

LEIGH SALES: (Laughs) Is there any ...

DAVID WALSH: There's a call and response in some of the academic art community that isn't about establishing a knowledge base, it's about establishing the likelihood of securing tenure. It's about promotion in the system. And it becomes - quite often, it becomes a mechanism for concealing rather than revealing.

LEIGH SALES: You mentioned earlier in the interview that when you were at university, you were a guy with not many friends, bit of a nerd with no friends. I've noticed even while I've been here with you, people have come up to say, "Oh, David, thanks so much for what you're doing," and people really clearly love you. That must feel good?

DAVID WALSH: It has been quite gratifying. And there are people that have done it superbly. One woman said to me - you know, I was a bit of a long hair, I'm still a bit of a long hair - said that, "I used to cross the street when I saw you walking down the road, and I'd just like to say thank you for what you've done," so - I thought that was superb. I enjoy that. And another fellow said - he brings over about a three-month-old baby and he says, "I didn't want to come and talk to you, but Tim here," he points at his kid, "insisted - and he told me I had to tell you how much he likes your museum." So, yeah, they're magic moments.

LEIGH SALES: Reading your memoir, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, this has been an incredibly unusual and interesting and really rich and unexpected life." Is that how it's felt to live it?

DAVID WALSH: I don't know, but I would hate to think that any life I led, I wouldn't feel that. It's ... borderline miracle. It's a very fortunate thing to be born at all, and of course, yeah, I've had even more fortune, but you can pick and choose when you write a book.

LEIGH SALES: David, you've been so generous with your time. It's been a real pleasure being able to come down here and talk to you. Thank you very much

DAVID WALSH: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

LEIGH SALES: That was really fun.