About the editor
Alistair Deane, Pontoon Line
I spent decades on the compliance side of Australian gaming floors — counting machines, checking licences, reconciling floor plans against what the regulator had on file. I write this record from a desk in Melbourne, without a badge to carry anymore.
Why I started keeping this
Floor plans get discarded the day a venue renovates. Machine counts from a 1994 opening exist, if at all, in a filing cabinet nobody labelled for the future. I watched this happen at more than one site — new carpet laid over the exact spot where an inspector once stood.
Licensing paperwork fares no better. A state gaming authority keeps what it must for the audit cycle in front of it, then lets the rest lapse. Nobody was tasked with keeping a plain account of dates, materials and decisions across the whole region — so I decided the task was mine.
I am not a historian by training. I am an auditor who noticed that the record was thinner than the industry it describes, and started writing down what I could still verify.
An auditor's job was never to admire the carpet — it was to confirm the carpet matched the plan lodged with the regulator.
What this record is not
This site sticks to Oceania casino history alone — the makeshift venues, the fixed-structure complexes, the permits issued region by region instead of at a national level. I don't publish odds, house edges or side-by-side operator comparisons.
That narrowness is deliberate. An auditor who strays into recommending where to play has stopped being an auditor. I keep the two roles separate, even now that only one of them still applies to me.
I take no sponsorship from any operator, supplier or industry body. Nobody licenses, edits or pays for what appears on this page, and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I keep writing.
He wanted the paperwork, not the atmosphere — most journalists wanted the reverse.
The work continues state by state
I add to this record as documents surface — a Burswood floor plan, a Casino Canberra licensing letter, a Jupiters opening-night program. Each entry gets checked against at least one other dated source before it is published, and where the sources disagree, I say so rather than choose a side.