‘She plays the rich b1tch so well’: Who is Mona’s first lady, Kirsha Kaechele, really?

From going to court over the Hobart museum’s Ladies Lounge to working with foresters, Mrs David Walsh is putting her wealthy dilettante persona to clever use.

Kaechele never finished her university degree, choosing instead to take up an offer from American cable network VH1 to document her world adventures in a reality-TV-style show. The show never eventuated, coming undone in Lebanon where Kaechele, aged 23, ended up living with a “Hezbollah family” and the producer wanted out (you can read all about it on Kaechele’s Substack blog).

It’s hard to get a clear chronology of Kaechele’s life as it shoots off in so many -directions, and some of the stories she tells are so out there that they sound apocryphal – such as her adventures taking ayahuasca with -shamans in the Amazon, or being hired to design the “first zero--energy apartment in New York” for a -“currency billionaire”, until the global -financial crisis foiled that. “That’s why I’m writing creative non--fiction,” Kaechele says. “I don’t need to make anything up, it’s so magnificent the way it unfolds, and the -actual stories themselves are outrageous.”

In 2000, she moved to New Orleans on a whim, into St Roch, 8th Ward, an undesirable neighbourhood. She bought six derelict properties, lived in one of them and began her KKProjects/Life is Art Foundation, inviting artists to create installations in the area’s abandoned homes. She started growing vegetables with local kids, too, and helping them sell the produce to restaurants. She’s replicated the 24 Carrot Gardens project in Hobart, where it extends into 24 schools.

Her friend of 20 years, New Orleans-based designer Alexa Pulitzer, tells me via email that Kaechele arrived in the city with “no agenda” and “created an exciting art scene from nothing”. “St Roch … was the home of pimps, gangsters and drug dealers. One could say that Kirsha and her Life is Art Foundation put St Roch on the map because many creatives moved into that -neighbourhood after she made it ‘cool’ to be there.”

But when the GFC hit, the foundations that were -supporting KK Projects stopped giving. Kaechele lost her architecture job with the currency billionaire, burnt through her savings to pay her subcontractors and still had mortgages on multiple properties. In an effort to keep her New Orleans art projects afloat, she started growing medical marijuana on a farm she’d bought in California. “We made money, we made a massive crop in the first round, but that was exactly when I moved to Tasmania to be with David.”

It’s late November and I’m off to visit Kaechele at her writing retreat, the room of her own, albeit a multi-room, multi-bathroom, double-storey place, right on the beach at Opossum Bay, a 45-minute drive out of Hobart. She’s just arrived back here from a trip abroad. “Oh my god, I was on the most amazing boat ride across the Atlantic, and it was fully insane,” she says. The “boat”, I later learn, was a Ritz-Carlton super yacht, a cruise organised by a “global alliance” that calls itself Earth One. “It was sort of like ‘Save the world, save the planet’,” Kaechele says.

Her fellow -travellers, according to the Earth One website, were “interdisciplinary and intergenerational global leaders”. Or, as Kaechele puts it, “a pretty wide range of humans, really rich technologists and venture capitalists, crypto boys, right-wingers, Trump supporters, RFK jnr [supporters] … I had so many conversations with anti-vaxxers.” How did she cope? “Well, I like it, because I like being with people that I don’t agree with. I find that very fun and fascinating and interesting, it’s like cultural anthropology,” she says. “Never had I been with such a diverse group of humans. We’re talking, like, Burning Man, yoga teachers, New Age goddesses … Indigenous leaders.”

“I only really can deal with men of extreme intelligence. My dad was a brilliant mathematician.”Kirsha Kaechele

Kaechele was on the cruise to research her forest congress work. She wanted to connect with people who had market expertise, to try to “understand what -market opportunities there are for the preservation of nature”. (Walsh avoided the trip, fearing he’d end up in a terrible argument with a crypto bro.)

As a private driver takes us in his Tesla to Opossum Bay, I ask about the time Kaechele first laid eyes on Walsh. It was 2007, Switzerland, at Art Basel, then the world’s leading contemporary art fair, and Kaechele was talking with a journalist in a beer garden. “David walks in … and he’s so out of place. Everyone is in their formal suits, polished leather shoes, the European art dealer look … and he’s wearing torn jeans, a T-shirt that says ‘F--- God’ I think, or ‘The Death of God’ … and a really cute jacket, and I think he had a shaved head and really thick glasses, which I responded to, because I like a nerd and I need a nerd. I only really can deal with men of extreme intelligence. My dad was a brilliant mathematician. I need a brilliant mathematician, with silver hair, ideally.” (Walsh later tells me he was, in fact, wearing his “F--- Terrorist” T-shirt.)

“David came up to me, and the guy [I was with] was a little standoffish. He said to David, ‘What do you do?’ and David said, ‘I’m a mathematician’, and I was like, ‘I knew it, you look like a math nerd’. And David said to the guy, ‘What do you do?’ and the guy said, ’Well, I’m a journalist for Art and Auction magazine, and David looked at him blankly, and the guy was like, ’You know, it’s kind of like The New York Times of art, and David’s like, ‘Well, it’s not exactly like The New York Times is it, because I’ve heard of The New York Times’ … I was, like, woo, that’s wonderful, fighting over me.”

And so began their love affair. Walsh and Kaechele travelled through Europe, met in London, and Kaechele visited Tasmania, but the two faced seemingly irreconcilable differences. “We just fought,” Kaechele says. “I was really used to Southern gentlemen, and I read his Australian Asperger’s genius-mathematician ways as a sign of him not valuing me. We had cultural differences, I think it was that simple.”

Three years passed. Kaechele had other boyfriends and lovers, more adventures and misadventures, but she could not forget Walsh. The two reconnected in 2009 when Walsh travelled to the US for a wedding and invited Kaechele along – she was then splitting her time between New York and New Orleans. “I said, ‘Sure, but just as friends, because I’m dating someone.’ ” When Walsh showed up in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, she realised she “didn’t want anyone else except him”.

It would take another nine months, though, before she’d move permanently to Hobart. I ask whether that was a difficult decision. “Not really … it certainly had an impact on my life and my work but my priority at that point was to have a partner and be a mother,” Kaechele says. “I was 34 … it was time. That was my priority, so I was willing to give everything up to pursue that.”

Soon after she arrived in Hobart, Kaechele faced an onslaught of bad press involving her New Orleans -art projects, and suggestions she’d run off to Tasmania to avoid paying taxes. Walsh tells me “she cried for days”. The stories were not accurate, Kaechele says. The abandoned houses she’d bought came with charges called liens, for which she was not responsible, that are applied by local law on vacant properties. While living in New Orleans, she was able to go into city hall and present documentation such as press clippings showing that she was using the houses as art spaces. “Six months later, the taxes would mature again … I was never going to pay those taxes, they’re not mine, and the city never wanted to pursue them, but they couldn’t erase them. That was a total mismanagement of the truth, that I was a tax dodger, but it’s just not what happened.”

Kaechele’s New Orleans projects are now -better funded than ever – by Walsh, in part out of his sense of guilt about “extracting Kirsha from her social milieu”. “It’s certainly one of the reasons – it’s her money, too, of course – that I’m willing to be engaged to the extent that I am in New Orleans, when it’s not a place I’m -connected to in any way,” he tells me.

Opossum Bay is a sleepy, seaside community that wraps around a shallow, blissfully calm cove. Kaechele opens the gate and we walk down to the house via a sloping garden, landscaped with sandstone and native shrubs. When we enter I can see why she calls it her “pirate house” – a pirate ship is built into the living room. It’s totally mad, doubles as a kitchen bench and looks unbelievably good. There’s also a mock lighthouse. When she bought the place, the pirate ship and lighthouse were painted a lurid red. Kaechele has -repainted them a breezy white. She’s toned down the kitsch, decorating with an elegant palette of blue and white, putting down parquetry, installing Murano chandeliers and other high-end furnishings such as a blackwood bathtub and onyx-topped tables.

I ask whether Walsh comes here too. “It’s more my place,” she says. “He doesn’t actually like coming here because he doesn’t swim, and he likes to walk and he finds the walk boring … it’s definitely my little getaway.”

When I ask where her writing desk is, she indicates the blue velvet couch in the living room. “I do everything on my phone,” she says.

I tell her that she lives an enchanted life. “It was weird, it wasn’t always luxurious,” she says. “My dad’s house was an actual hellhole. I’m not exaggerating.” She laughs. “I have been deprived from material pleasures in my life, and then I’ve done it to myself, travelling through the Third World, living in 50-cent-a-night -hotels in my youth, but I also landed in beautiful places.”

Her father, she says, was anti-materialist – “all mind” – and after he split from her mother, he was happy to live in “the ugliest, crappiest apartment you could rent”. Her mother, however, was an aesthete: “She made everything beautiful at all times; everything was an artwork, our house was never a house, it was an art installation, so I definitely get that from her.”

Kaechele appears to have both embraced and rebelled against her hippie upbringing. “Totally!” she says. “‘I’m going to get married and I’m going to marry a rich man.’ Take that! ‘And I’m going to live in luxury!’ ”

She extends that luxury into her social -projects. As she says in one of her Mona blogs, “I can’t do it if it’s ugly.” She set up Beauty Lab in Bridgewater, one of Hobart’s lower-socio-economic suburbs, where school kids learn about science by making natural beauty -products. It’s also furnished with Murano chandeliers and onyx slab tables. “If I bought them for myself, why wouldn’t I buy them for my social project?”

I’ve heard various criticisms about what it’s like working with Kaechele, among them that doing so can take over people’s lives, especially with all the last-minute changes. Hobart artist and former Mona -creative producer Natalie Holtsbaum, who along with her husband, furniture designer Joseph Hodgson, made the Ladies Lounge’s phallic couch, concedes, “There were definitely times when I became exhausted” but adds: “I don’t regret it for a second … I learnt so much. I was definitely pushed to my limits and along the way met some really amazing people. I don’t want this to sound too sucky, but I think Kirsha is a really evolved being … she has tenacity … she is not hindered by people’s opinions, but she’s also passionate and -really does want good things for people.”

Another criticism I hear is that she leaves others to achieve her ideas and takes the glory.

“A lot of people underestimate the work of coming up with a good idea,” counters Sarah Proud, chief -executive officer of Material Institute, Kaechele’s registered charity that runs community events, social enterprises and food education programs across Tasmania, such as 24 Carrot Gardens. “There are definite moments of frustration, I think, for our team, when she’s inconsistent with her communication because of the diversity of her interests, but I certainly don’t think she leaves us to do the work – and where she does, that’s our job,” Proud says. “She creates incredible -opportunities for people, and I’m one of those.”

“It might be the most traumatic event of her life … but one that made her who she is,” Kaechele’s mother, Tania, tells me via FaceTime from Los Angeles. She’s tracing her daughter’s life back to Guam, where she had to contend with climatic extremes and cultural differences. “It’s the far reaches of the world, you have to have guts to be out there.”

Tania Kaechele, 75, is just as her daughter describes her – dramatic, sexy, fun, unpredictable. I note the physical similarity: same high cheekbones, full lips and red lipstick. The marked difference is hair: Tania’s is dramatically black, Kirsha opts for reddish blonde.

Tania recently moved back to LA after some 40 years in Guam, and the walls of her home are salon-hung with an exuberance of artworks, including her own colourful abstracts. She had her daughter painting as soon as she could sit up and made play-dough every day for her to sculpt with. “Art was completely integrated from birth,” she says. Topanga Canyon, which was recently affected by LA’s catastrophic fires, was full of artists – The Doors’ drummer lived next door, Neil Young was there too, as well as other rock stars, and musicians for the LA Philharmonic. Her daughter was “always a straight-A student … she was gifted and talented. She became -rebellious and difficult later … but that’s fine.”

Tania recognised something in her daughter’s recent statement about women being better than men. “That was a very extreme statement – I know where it came from.” Guam, Tania says, is primarily a matrilineal society in which women are considered better than men.

I ask what Kaechele is like when she’s just being her daughter. “We do FaceTime and I text her all the time,” Tania says. “She doesn’t answer me all the time, that’s fine … but I’m probably the only person who doesn’t kiss up to her.” She adds with a mischievous laugh: “I’m sure she can’t stand it, but that’s my responsibility, to be her mother … I think everybody kisses up to both of them [Kaechele and Walsh].”

I’m curious about the kinds of things she and Kaechele don’t agree upon.

“Well, actually, I’m very proud of her, for the most part I’m extremely proud of her.” She admits, however, that she wasn’t in favour of Kirsha marrying David at the time. “This is probably part of why I ended up being persona non grata. I didn’t approve of their marriage.” Why was that? “He just seemed too patriarchal.” And how do you feel now? “I think they’re perfect,” she says. “The wonderful thing about them is they care about others and do for others far, far, above what they do for themselves.”

I meet up with David Walsh at the couple’s Mona apartment, which is concealed behind a Corten steel gate of rich rusty-red. He’s wearing a multi-coloured striped jumper with holes in it, khaki-coloured pants, striped socks and a T-shirt that looks in need of a wash. I ask what he thinks of his wife’s growing public profile. “It’s interesting because as the dynamic has shifted and she has the power, I’m the one who is less secure,” he muses, adding that he doesn’t mind at all that she’s morphing into the face of Mona. “I never really wanted that role,” he says, perhaps forgetting that he once described Mona as his “soapbox”. These days, he prefers to be behind the scenes. “I don’t think we gain anything by talking to the press, and you may have noticed that I’ve completely stopped.”

I ask about the first time he set eyes on her, in the beer garden at Art Basel, and what attracted him to her. “Initially, it was her looks,” he says. “She has a sharp angular face, high cheekbones.” He launches into the anecdote about their first meeting and relishes -telling me how he dispensed with the journalist she was with. He repeats the stories about their travel together through Europe, including visiting German artist Anselm Kiefer’s studio in Barjac in the south of France, a component of which Walsh is duplicating at Mona.

“She then came to Australia once … it obviously wasn’t working, we could both see that it was going to fizzle out, and we parted fairly amicably,” he says. “We’ve always butted heads because we’re both so headstrong and both so self-confident … I’m sure we were both bastards as kids.” Yet it seems as though one couldn’t dream up a more compatible partner for him. “We both tried out a few models before each other,” Walsh laughs.

We talk about the addendum to the media storm of last year’s Ladies Lounge litigation, which came when Kaechele was forced to reveal that she herself had -created all of the Picasso artworks in the lounge as part of the layers of jokes about provenance, wealth and gender embedded into the space. Not everyone appreciated the humour; some labelled her actions “childish” and “unprofessional”. Art critic Joanna Mendelssohn got the joke though, describing the entire saga in The Conversation as one of the most effective pieces of -performance art she’d seen: “She has also succeeded in exposing the patriarchy as a humourless joke.”

After the initial tribunal loss, Kaechele moved the “Picassos” to the women’s toilets, where discrimination on the basis of gender is allowed, then posted images of them in the toilets on her Instagram. Walsh says now that he was furious. “I would never have -approved the ‘Picassos’ in the toilet, but the curators did it -without asking me,” he says. “I knew we were f---ed. I knew that meant they would be able to identify the fakes straight away … when you search for Mona now, the first thing you get is fakes at Mona. I didn’t want that. So I would not have allowed that … but I don’t have the power anymore.”

As he feared, the Picasso estate came knocking. Kaechele apologised and removed the fakes from view. The estate’s legal affairs head said that it regretted Kaechele’s actions but considered the case closed.

“It’s not that she’s a rich b1tch, it’s that she plays the rich b1tch so well and enjoys it so much.”David Walsh

When the Ladies Lounge had its last hurrah in December, a new installation replaced the “Picassos”: 91 Penises, an assortment of shapes and sizes by American abstract sculptor Peter Lundberg commissioned for the reopening. (The work, since upgraded to 99 Penises, is described in the gallery as by an “uncredited male” – and so the joke continues.)

Walsh wasn’t that keen on Mona’s involvement in the ABC’s Eat the Invaders program, either, which is fronted by the charismatic Tony Armstrong. “I wouldn’t have allowed Mona to be used that way if she hadn’t wanted it to be,” he says. “I don’t need publicity; 26 per cent of people in Australia are aware of Mona. There are ways we could use awareness, but I don’t think the ABC would be that vehicle. Promotion at the AFL would be that vehicle.”

I ask what he finds most difficult about Kaechele, and he slips in the answer – that he’d like more time with her – while talking mainly about the aspects of her character of which he is in awe. “She completely supports our relationship, but her performance in our relationship – and she likes that performance – is the arm candy, is the trophy wife. The rest of us play multiple roles. She just plays one, and she plays it very, very, well, and that’s what I think she gets the backlash for. It’s not that she’s a rich b1tch, it’s that she plays the rich b1tch so well, and enjoys it so much and is so satisfied to be it.”

Having observed Walsh and Kaechele for many years, I have little doubt about the depth of their -relationship, but, playing devil’s advocate, I ask Walsh whether he believes Kaechele was attracted to him for his wealth. “Well, I think that is part of what I am. I think if I went broke it would not compel her to leave me, so that’s the answer to the question. But that doesn’t mean she would have gone out with me if I was broke in the first place. And I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have.”

I return to the idea of legacy. It’s a subject Walsh, who turns 64 this year, has been thinking about a lot recently, writing in a Mona blog that “symbolic immortality matters to me” – hence his addiction to building new museum wings. I want to know about Kaechele’s role in Mona’s legacy and whether she might one day be in charge. “She’s guaranteed to be … in terms of biological legacy, neither of my two adult daughters are interested … Sunday claims that she’s taking it over, but she’s nine. But if I just died, Kirsha would control the funds, and what would she do? I don’t know, I don’t want to know. I know that whatever it is, we would recognise it as her.”

Walsh imagines Kaechele would continue to take Mona out to the community and be “more abundantly political”. For the moment, though, her budget has been frozen as Walsh contends with construction costs associated with a new library and the Kiefer installation.

When it comes to money, then, the power still rests with Walsh. The dynamic may be shifting but hasn’t shifted entirely – Walsh’s projects take priority. “I think what she’d like is a budget to do whatever she likes with, and that would probably be a reasonable thing, but at the moment I’m actually accruing more debt,” he says. “That’s the other thing, she’s more conservative fiscally than I am and she would like us to have something in the nest egg and we don’t. Everything I own is mortgaged.” That sounds worrying. “Not to me. It’s motivating. Why make money if you’ve got money?”

Kaechele changes into a teeny-weeny green bikini. I put on my black one-piece. We head down to the Pirate House sauna. I flop onto the bench, keeping as low as I can. Kaechele sits upright, eager for the hottest hit. The sauna faces the beach and the odd local strolls by; I suspect that’s the only reason we’re not nude. We stay here for a very, very long time, talking about all kinds of things: koans, the forestry industry, hallucinogenic drugs. Ayahuasca, she says, is “terrifying”, but a microdose of LSD or mushrooms, and “you know what you’re signing up for”. “For me, it’s the same as two cocktails, in that there’s an elevated freedom, connection to self, more connection to others, to nature, it’s a little bit more wholesome than alcohol,” she says.

I’ll stick with the cocktails. Still, it makes me wonder about Kaechele’s openness to others and to life.

“What I love about her is that she will walk into uncertainty, into difficulty,” says her friend Pippa Dickson, a furniture designer and consultant who has worked on several projects with Kaechele, including co-editing Eat the Problem. “She’ll walk into the fire to be reborn, to have a new idea, a new thought, and that’s pretty rare.”

I hear this over and again, that Kaechele goes where the fire is. She pours water onto the sauna stones and they sizzle and spit. I duck. “Ah, this is so good,” she says, eyes closed. I tell her that she seems to breeze through life, that she makes the likes of the court cases, the congress and the symposium look easy. “I work very, very hard, so hard for it,” she says, her arms up high against the cedar walls, head down, dripping.

“Not that there isn’t joy in it, eruptions of joy and ‘aha’ moments of hilarity … but I’m in there and I’m in it and I’m a person, and I have an ego, and it’s hard …”

Kaechele is panting and moaning, and I wonder whether I should start worrying because it’s blistering hot and we’ve been in here so long, so I sink into the floor and open the sauna door a crack more. Kaechele rises higher and higher, standing upright where the heat is merciless, hands against the wall, body pouring sweat. Into the fire.

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Gabriella Coslovich