As a kid we’d have a flutter on the Spring Racing Carnival. Mum, Dad and my three siblings would put 50 cents each way on something in the Caulfield Cup. Mum’s punting system involved picking a horse that was grey, had a floral name or an Irish link. It covered a lot of bases, and she had an occasional small win.
A few weeks later, Melbourne Cup Day was on the first Tuesday in November. It wasn’t a public holiday in Ballarat. We had a sweep in the street and at school, using the template in the newspaper. The race stopped St Columba’s Primary School, Ballarat North, as well as the nation. It blared over the crackly school speakers.
In a nod to Richmond’s yellow and black colours, I picked the winner of the 1977 Melbourne Cup because the horse was called Gold and Black, and the jockey wore gold with black hoops and a black cap. There wasn’t online betting, and you had to gather your coins and physically go to the TAB to put on a bet.
Aussies would bet on two flies climbing up a wall, they say, but gambling in my formative years was something many people flirted with for a few weeks in Spring. Dad handed over his pay envelope every Thursday night and it was a weekly miracle how Mum managed.
On Saturdays, we’d stay up late and watch the Penthouse Club on Channel 7, which was a harness racing show interspersed with entertainment. It was a normalisation of gambling.
For generations there were SP (illegal) bookies allowing people to bet if they weren’t trackside. I recently learned at a eulogy for my 94-year-old neighbour that as a child she was a lookout for one of the then local operators in the laneways of inner suburban Richmond, then dubbed Struggletown. No doubt, those families living on struggle street battled the downsides of gambling, including domestic violence and poverty. These bookies, circumventing the system, led to the TAB in the early 1960s.
In Victoria, we didn’t have pokies until the early 1990s, but my husband grew up in NSW where it was common for people to play the pokies after a counter meal. Many older Victorians went on bus trips over the border to Barmah to play the pokies. Trips were heavily subsidised with cheap meals. Crown Casino arrived in Melbourne in 1994. Governments welcomed it as a boon to tourism and jobs,