Hobart

MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, sits built into a cliffside above the Derwent River on Hobart's outskirts, funded entirely by David Walsh's own winnings from a career as a professional gambler. Since opening in 2011, it's built a genuine international reputation for deliberately provocative, sometimes confronting exhibits, a curatorial approach most conventional museums avoid, and it's widely credited with transforming Hobart's cultural profile from a quiet island capital into a genuine art-world destination that draws visitors specifically for the museum itself.

That reputation sits alongside a considerably older, darker layer of Tasmanian history. Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula a couple of hours from Hobart, operated as one of the harshest penal settlements in the British Empire through the 19th century, and its extensive surviving ruins now form part of the UNESCO-listed Australian Convict Sites, a somber but historically significant stop that draws a genuinely different kind of visitor than MONA's contemporary art crowd.

Salamanca Place, a row of Georgian-era sandstone warehouses along Hobart's waterfront, hosts a large Saturday market that's become one of the city's central weekly rituals, and the surrounding precinct's historic architecture gives central Hobart a genuinely well-preserved colonial character distinct from mainland Australian cities.

Tasmania's wilderness sits remarkably close to Hobart given how remote it feels once you're in it. Cradle Mountain, part of a larger UNESCO-listed wilderness area, offers serious hiking through genuinely rugged, changeable terrain, and its proximity to a state capital, closer than equivalent wilderness areas are to most mainland Australian cities, gives Hobart-based visitors real access to backcountry Tasmania without an extended expedition.

Tasmania's isolation as an island state, separated from mainland Australia by the Bass Strait, has also helped preserve unique wildlife found nowhere else, most famously the Tasmanian devil, a carnivorous marsupial that survives here in numbers no longer found on the Australian mainland, where it went extinct centuries ago.