On the banks of the Derwent River, Hobart harbours a subterranean storehouse of eye-popping eccentricity. As I ended my visit, I heard one chap huff,  “Well, that’s two wasted hours of my life I will never get back, “ to which his wife protested, “That’s the best museum we have ever been too.” Carved into the riverside escarpment, the Museum of Old and New Art, universally known as MONA, boasts one of the most provocative collections of art open to the public.  And it’s the biggest private museum in Australia.

This edgy, eclectic phenomenon has been so widely embraced by locals and visitors alike, MONA has emerged as an Australian national treasure. 6 years old, MONA was the brain child of Tasmanian, David Walsh, an art collector and mathematician who made a fortune fine-tuning algorithms enabling him to beat bookies and casinos and bookies at their own game. And ever since he opened his museum, like than man, MONA has feasted on up-ending the conventional. It’s nicknamed “the subversive adult Disneyland.”

Unlike a typical museum, with a cliché pillared-entrance, entering MONA is like falling down a rabbit hole. From the foyer, a spiral staircase leads you 17 metres underground, into a cave-like space, flanked by a 240-million-year-old Triassic sandstone wall. Apparently David Walsh, wanted the exposed wall to provide a greeting as such to creationists, and a challenge to their beliefs. The flooring is recycled jarrah salvaged from an old woolshed. Like the art, the gallery space is equally engulfing.

What follows are three levels of steel and stone studded with art and objects loosely themed around sex, evolution and death.  It unapologetically aims to shock, offend, inform and entertain in equal measure. Standing in the basement, I gazed in awe of the gigantic installation called “Bit.fall,” a rain-painting machine created by German artist Julius Popp.

Spanning two stories, this multi-million dollar contraption comprises 128 computer-controlled nozzles, that release dripping cascades of water in the shape of trending phrases harvested daily from news websites. This pulsing waterfall of words, streamed from real-time Google searches, ranked as my favourite art piece. It’s clever, current and rather hypnotic, like a cascading ode to the unrelenting news cycle.

I was lulled into a false sense of complacency.  As I walked on, mulling whether MONA’s reputation for shockability was overhyped, I was suddenly confronted by the chocolate sculpture of the remains of a Chechen suicide bomber. Yes, chocolate. Stephen J Shanabrook’s cast of a disembowelled suicide bomber rendered in chocolate is deeply unsettling.  The piece is called On the Road to Heaven The Highway to Hell. It’s located alongside a collection of mummies.  You have been warned.

One level up, a wall has been lined with over 100 white porcelain moulds of female genitalia – all noticeably individualistic, while another wall boasts a gigantic image of a man engaged in an unhealthy act with a canine. I really didn’t need to see that.  And it’s not hard to see why some art snobs sniff at MONA’s obsession with smut.

But the centre-piece of MONA that repulses and engrosses in equal doses is called Cloaca Professional by Belgian artists, Wim Delvoye. This room-sized machine of giant test tubes, pumps and glass receptacles parodies the digestive tract of humans in lurid detail. Nicknamed the poop machine, it is fed twice a day, and if you really want to, you can watch the full digestive process of food unfold over three hours. I didn’t stay for the final act, but apparently the bi-product from this giant version of the digestive tract is absolutely pungent.  

If gross-out art is not your bag, some welcome doses of lighter relief do punctuate proceedings. Don’t miss Erwin Wurm’s Fat Car. I loved this - a full-sized Porsche Carrera puffed up and engorged into obesity by some comically creative panel work. It looks cartoonish and Fat Car pointedly serves as a comment on western consumption and mindless overindulgence.

Sprinkled among the traffic-stoppers and the aesthetically extreme pieces, I did enjoy David Walsh’s private collection of antiquities. After all that modern art, it was cathartically soothing to gaze at a 1,500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus, a collage made of Neolithic flints and gold coins taken from one of the statues at the Parthenon in Athens.

I’m sure you’ve come across plenty of museums and galleries that offer life membership, if the price is right. Well true to form, David Walsh has taken that one step further with MONA’s eternity membership offer. For a mere $75,000, suitably impressed museum visitors can set about absorbing themselves into the MONA collection, even beyond their mortal coil. The contract allows the ashes of eternity members to be incorporated into the collection and displayed in urns. How very MONA.

Last year, Lonely Planet named MONA the best modern art gallery in the world, cementing its credentials as a leading light in the Australian cultural landscape. It is the ultimate demonstration of the “eye of the beholder” adage, but well worth sampling.

After docking in Hobart on the Emerald Princess, it was an effortless, eye-pleasing walk around the historic waterfront to where the MONA Roma ferry departs hourly, from Brooke Street Pier. Push the boat out and upgrade to the Posh Pit. This exclusive lounge sports a fabulous bar and outside deck, below the bridge. Enjoy complimentary canapes and beverages as you’re whisked across the water, on the 30 minute trip to the museum. www.mona.net.au

Princess Cruises operates a series of Trans-Tasman cruises over the summer season, with five ships currently homeported Down Under.  An extensive schedule of sailings from New Zealand to Hobart will resume later in the year, in the 2017/18 summer months. For more information and cruise bookings, see your travel agent or visit www.princess.com

Mike Yardley is our Travel Correspondent on Jack Tame Saturday Mornings.