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A bone of fact

by David Walsh

Professional gambler and MONA founder David Walsh reflects on his unconventional life and career in this memoir. The narrative details his path to wealth and the creation of his unique museum in Hobart, Tasmania.

Accession 9781742612911 ISBN 9781742612911 Publisher Picador

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position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:10
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binding_type: Hard Back
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spine_text: DAVID WALSH A BONE OF FACT PICADOR

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A bone of fact

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Topics and Themes

1. **Memoir & Unconventional Autobiography**
Walsh's book is a deeply personal, self-aware memoir that resists traditional narrative structure — packed with digressions, footnotes, and meta-commentary on the act of writing itself. It blurs the line between self-portrait and performance, with Walsh delivering his own invented identity directly to the reader.

Connect to books about: autobiography, confessional writing, literary memoir, self-invention, unreliable narrators.

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2. **Gambling, Probability & Mathematical Thinking**
Walsh built his fortune through a computerised, mathematically driven gambling system. The book engages seriously with probability, statistical likelihood, and the logic of chance — including reflections on the sheer statistical improbability of his own success.

Connect to books about: probability theory, behavioural economics, risk-taking, game theory, the mathematics of chance.

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3. **Art Collection, Curation & Museum-Making**
A central pillar of the book is Walsh's creation of MONA — the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart — a radical, underground museum carved into a cliff and filled with provocative works centred on sex and death. Walsh explores what it means to collect art and why institutions matter.

Connect to books about: art curation, museum history, collecting, contemporary art criticism, patronage.

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4. **Wealth, Class & Self-Made Identity**
Walsh grew up in modest circumstances in Tasmania and became a multi-millionaire through gambling — a trajectory that sits uneasily against the cultural elite he eventually joined. The book grapples with what money means, what it can build, and the strangeness of becoming rich.

Connect to books about: class mobility, wealth and identity, self-made success, the sociology of money.

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5. **Provocation, Iconoclasm & Challenging Culture**
MONA was deliberately designed to confront and unsettle — and Walsh's memoir mirrors this ethos. He positions himself as a defiant iconoclast, tearing down received wisdom while championing the transgressive and the uncomfortable in art and life.

Connect to books about: cultural disruption, avant-garde art movements, counterculture, aesthetic theory, transgression.

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6. **Death, Mortality & the Human Condition**
Walsh is preoccupied with death throughout — MONA itself has been described as a meditation on sex and mortality, and the memoir reflects on the vastness of human death across history, as well as the personal loss of his brother.

Connect to books about: mortality, grief, existentialism, the philosophy of death, memento mori in art.

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7. **Australian Identity & Place**
The book is deeply rooted in Tasmania and Australia — Walsh's working-class Hobart upbringing, his time at the tax office, the dog tracks and pokies of Australian life, and ultimately his transformation of a Derwent River peninsula into a world-class cultural institution.

Connect to books about: Australian identity, Tasmanian history, place and belonging, regional culture.

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8. **Eccentricity, Genius & the Outsider**
Walsh occupies a paradoxical position: a mathematician-gambler-art-collector who became one of Australia's most influential cultural figures while remaining deliberately outside mainstream respectability. The book is a sustained meditation on what it means to operate on the margins of society while reshaping its centre.

Connect to books about: outsider figures, creative genius, eccentricity, nonconformity, cultural entrepreneurship.

A bone of fact

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