Method
How this record is researched and corrected
I spent thirty years reading compliance files before I spent a day writing about them, and that habit has not left me. Every date on this site traces to a document I can name — a gazette notice, a Hansard transcript, a company prospectus — not to a memory of how a casino floor felt at midnight.
Where the dates come from
State licensing gazettes carry the primary record — the notice that a licence exists, the date it took effect, and often the conditions attached to it. Parliamentary Hansard supplies the argument behind a law, which is why the 1956 New South Wales debate on poker machines sits in my files in full, not summarised. Company histories, published by operators at anniversaries, fill gaps the gazettes leave — a soft-opening date, a floor's original size.
- State licensing gazettes
- Parliamentary Hansard transcripts
- Company anniversary histories
- Site visits by the editor
I have also walked the sites myself, Melbourne to Alice Springs, checking a foundation stone or a fitted plaque against the paper trail before I trust it.
What I leave out
What you're reading is a history, not a form guide. You'll find no live odds here, no promotions, no ranking of operators and nothing resembling betting advice — the record tracks what got built and when, rather than a machine's payout this week. Anyone hunting for tonight's terms will come away empty, and I've turned down requests to include them.
The plain fact is that the people of New South Wales are going to gamble whether this House permits it or not.
A quarterly pass
Four times a year I set the published dates against the primary sources again — gazette by gazette, prospectus by prospectus — because operators reissue histories and archives digitise material that was previously only on paper. Most passes change nothing. Some correct a month I had recorded as a year, or a soft-opening date I had folded into an official one.
You have Jupiters listed as opening in February 1986, but the doors were open to the public three months earlier.
Corrections
An error reported by email is checked against the original source before anything on the page changes. If the source confirms the correction, I amend the text and add a dated note beneath it, stating what changed and why. If the source does not confirm it, I reply and explain what I found, and the page stays as it was. I do not remove a note once it is added, even years later — the history of the correction is itself part of the record.
Funding
No sponsorship from the gambling industry sits behind Pontoon Line, and no affiliate links point to any operator. None of this exists to steer you toward a casino floor, a betting account or a promotion. The sole thing that matters here is nailing a date, a name and a metric measurement — then keeping it accurate once it's published.