This year’s Dark Mofo was a fleeting visit, a day and a half lifted from a longer trip to Tasmania’s north-west coast, where I’ve been spending time with my mother, who is approaching her 90th year. She lives near Ulverstone, and something is grounding about being there, in the flat grey light of a Tasmanian winter, surrounded by paddocks and the smell of damp earth. But Hobart called, as it always does in June.
I drove down through the Lakes Highway, that isolated, mist-wrapped corridor through the central plateau that feels like driving along the edge of the world. The highland lakes were barely visible, ghost lakes in the fog, and the trees stood pale and skeletal along the road. It’s one of those drives that prepares you, somehow, for the strangeness of Dark Mofo.
I’d booked an Airbnb in Glebe, close enough to the waterfront that a short, if unsteady, stagger would get me home at the end of the night.
Dark Park and the Spirit of Tasmania
The first stop was Dark Park down at the waterfront. This year, it felt noticeably smaller. A large portion of the land the festival usually commandeers has been fenced off for the new AFL stadium development, and the park’s footprint reflected that.
But there was an unexpected compensation moored right next door. The new Spirit of Tasmania V is currently being fitted out in the docks, and Dark Mofo has transformed its enormous stadium-sized vehicle decks into a remarkable gallery and bar. Walking aboard felt genuinely surreal. Works by international and local artists hung in the cavernous spaces, lit dramatically against the industrial steel. Large-scale installations played with shadows; unsettling sculptures seemed to emerge from the vessel’s structure itself; immersive sound works resonated deep in the hull. The bar setup completed the atmosphere: beer in hand, surrounded by weird shit, inside a ship that hasn’t yet made a single crossing.
Salamanca and Bob Brown
From there, I walked to Salamanca for the opening of the annual Tarkine (or Takayna) exhibition at the Long Gallery, held in support of the Bob Brown Foundation. The photographs and artworks documenting that extraordinary wilderness are always humbling, and this year’s exhibition was no exception.
I was lucky enough to find a seat next to Bob Brown himself. We talked about the show, and I mentioned the artworks I’d just seen on the Spirit of Tasmania. It felt a little shallow the moment I said it. Here was a man who had dedicated his life to defending wild places, and I was chatting about festival installations on a car ferry. He was gracious about it, as he always seems to be.
The Feast and the Hanging Garden
That evening, the Dark Mofo Feast was a riot of candles, fire, noise, extraordinary food, craft beer and live music. I had dinner with an old friend, and we stayed far too long, which is exactly what you’re supposed to do. The Feast remains one of the best things about this festival. I finished the night at a party in the Hanging Garden, which needs no further explanation.
Becoming Modern at TMAG
The next morning, I visited Becoming Modern: Mid-Century Australian Art at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, curated by my friend Ash. The exhibition is a survey of the emergence of modernism in Australia across the twentieth century, drawn largely from the Tasmanian State Collection and, quite deliberately, foregrounding works by Tasmanian women artists, many of which are exhibited publicly for the first time. You move through rooms anchored by familiar names: Brett Whiteley’s restless energy, Arthur Boyd’s mythologised landscapes, John Olsen’s exuberant abstractions. But the real revelations are quieter: Clarice Beckett’s muted, atmospheric street scenes, and the Tasmanian artist Eileen Brooker, a significant figure in local modernism whose work deserves far wider recognition. Patricia Giles’s A Promise of Life After Fire (1978) is one of the exhibition’s most striking works, a scorched, regenerative landscape that feels both historical and urgently present. It’s a beautifully considered show.
TrunkMan at Contemporary Art Tasmania
On the way out of Hobart, I stopped at Contemporary Art Tasmania to see TrunkMan – SGB, an immersive installation by Hobart-based artist Xiyue (CiCi) Zhang and others, presented in partnership with Dark Mofo. The work is a fantastical, surreal playground, animations, paintings, soft sculptures, set design and performance woven together into a world where magical and strange stories unspool as if they were simply part of everyday island life. Zhang’s central contention is disarmingly simple: extraordinary things are happening around us all the time, if we’d only stop to look. It was the perfect note on which to leave.
Then two hours drive north to the airport, Hobart receding in the rear-view mirror, already planning next year.
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