We do not write about places we have researched. We write about places we have been. Dinners we have sat at. Guides who changed how we saw the world. Journeys that did not go to plan and were better for it.
Dark Mofo 2026 in Tasmania. Why the world’s most provocative festival belongs on your itinerary.
Every June, Hobart transforms. The streets bathe in red light. A giant Ogoh-Ogoh totem is paraded then sacrificed by fire. Strangers strip naked at dawn on the shortest day of the year and walk into the freezing Derwent River. This is Dark Mofo, and in 2026 it returns from 11 to 22 June.
Created by MONA, the museum that put Tasmania on the global cultural map, Dark Mofo is a midwinter celebration of pagan ritual, large-scale art, music, fire, light, and noise. The 2025 festival welcomed over one hundred and nineteen thousand attendees. The 2026 program is the most ambitious yet.
Dark Mofo is not for everyone. It is for the traveller who wants to be unsettled. Transformed. Who travels to feel something, not to tick a box.
The signature events: the Winter Feast at Princes Wharf with international guest chefs. Night Mass, the late-night takeover of Hobart’s CBD where over one hundred and fifty artists transform the city until dawn. The Ogoh-Ogoh ritual, where attendees write down their fears and feed them to a totem that is ceremonially burned on 21 June. And the Nude Solstice Swim at sunrise on 22 June, the winter solstice. It sounds extreme until you do it. Then it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
Accommodation books out twelve months in advance for the right properties. We typically place clients at MONA Pavilions in Berriedale, eight architect-designed river-facing suites set within the museum grounds. Festival packages include VIP Winter Feast entry and Night Mass tickets, but only through the right channels.
Most travellers fly in for the festival and fly out three days later. We think this is the wrong approach. Tasmania in winter is extraordinary, and Dark Mofo is best framed within a longer journey: Cradle Mountain, the Tamar Valley wine country, the Freycinet Peninsula, wild Bruny Island. Two weeks through Tasmania with Dark Mofo at its centre is one of the great winter trips on earth.
Dark Mofo 2026 runs 11 to 22 June. Tickets for headline events have already begun selling. Accommodation should be secured immediately.
Plan Your Dark Mofo Journey
Tell us when you would like to travel and we will design the entire journey around the festival and around how you actually like to travel.
Begin a Conversation