A written record, not a venue
Temporary first. Permanent after.
«I write about how these buildings and machines came to exist — I take no bets, hold no deposits, and run no casino or pokies floor of my own.»
Pontoon Line is a record of how casino licensing and pokies history unfolded across Oceania, state by state, decade by decade. I hold no licence and take no wager; I keep dates, materials and procedure straight, the way a compliance file used to be kept.
Most operators open with a temporary structure and finish with a permanent one — a pattern I trace through several jurisdictions on the guide page, since it explains why some opening dates look doubled in the record.
Casino, pokies — the two words this site keeps returning to
Across every state act I've worked through, a casino means nothing more than the licensed premise — the building and floor a state government (never a federal one) has gazetted. The term says nothing about size or styling; take Casino Canberra, granted its licence on 29 July 1994, which offers table games alone and carries no gaming-machine floor whatsoever.
Australians shorten poker machines to pokies, a word that goes back to 1956, the year New South Wales made them legal — but for registered clubs alone, with hotels deliberately excluded from that bill. The machines abandoned any resemblance to poker generations ago; the label simply never followed.
We watched Tasmania for ten years before we moved a single file.
No federal licence has ever existed
Casino licensing in Australia happened jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with no national scheme, so the openings bunched in the mid-1980s instead of arriving at a steady pace. Alice Springs got Lasseters in 1981 — a licensed floor serving a desert settlement of just a few thousand residents — and it stood nearly alone for years.
Queensland followed with Jupiters on the Gold Coast, a soft opening in November 1985 and an official one in February 1986. Burswood Island Casino in Perth opened on 30 December 1985 and was, at the time, the largest casino in Australia and reportedly the third-largest in the world.
Every state government wanted to see someone else's revenue figures first — none wanted to be the second failure.
In 1994 Crown Melbourne started out at a stopgap location before shifting to its lasting Southbank home; Sydney's The Star ran through nearly the identical sequence, trading at a temporary venue from 13 September 1995 and at its permanent one from 27 November 1997. I go into that sequence, along with the way pokies began in clubs alone, at some length in other pages here.
Found a date wrong, or have a source to offer
Show me a more accurate account and I'll amend what I've published. The editor's address is [email protected] — send a fix, a query, or a document that's escaped me so far; my replies come from Melbourne, and they come in writing.