Frequently asked, precisely answered
Questions on casino and pokies history, answered
I get the same questions from readers and from auditors half my age. Below are the ones worth answering properly — with dates, names and the state-by-state mechanics that most accounts skip.
Licensing and origins
When did Australia's first legal casino open?
Lasseters, out in Alice Springs, first opened its doors in 1981. Worth pausing on that — a licensed gaming house in a small desert settlement, running well before Melbourne or Sydney had any equivalent.
What draws the bulk of these openings together in the mid-1980s?
It comes down to who holds the licensing power — every state government hands out its own casino licence, with Canberra kept clear of the process. A decade earlier Tasmania had already issued its licence, and the other states used that interval to examine the model before writing statutes of their own. Next came the Gold Coast's Jupiters, trading quietly from November 1985 and formally from February 1986 — Queensland's first. Perth's Burswood Island Casino trailed it on 30 December 1985, timed on purpose to open before the year ran out.
Machines and pokies
Where does the word 'pokies' come from?
The term shortens 'poker machines', a phrase traceable to New South Wales statute from 1956. That label endured even as the machines drifted from anything card-based — spinning reels and symbols took over from poker decks long before I ever walked a gaming floor for audit work.
Why did the 1956 law hand pokies to clubs and exclude hotels?
Under the bill, poker machines became legal, but only for registered clubs to run. Hotels and pubs were shut out on purpose — a split that went on to define the entire eastern-states industry for decades to come.
Who introduced the bill, and on what premise?
C. A. 'Gus' Kelly, Minister for Cooperative Societies, introduced it on the blunt premise that Australians were going to gamble regardless of the law. Rather than expand gambling outright, the framing was that clubs — not-for-profit bodies — needed income beyond beer sales. That distinction made the machines politically palatable in a way hotel machines were not.
They were never sold to us as a vice. They were sold as a way to keep the clubhouse roof on.
Hotels asked for the same licence for years. The answer stayed no long after the reasoning had worn thin.
Table games and scale
Which casino runs tables with no pokies floor?
Casino Canberra, which began trading on 29 July 1994, stands apart from the usual Australian model — tables alone, without a single gaming machine on the floor. Every other jurisdiction followed a different template entirely.
Which casino was largest at its opening?
Perth's Burswood Island Casino, launched on 30 December 1985, was Australia's largest gaming venue right from the outset — and, by some tellings, the third-largest on the planet at that moment. Crown Melbourne arrived afterwards, opening in 1994 out of temporary premises before shifting to its permanent Southbank site; Sydney's The Star trod the identical route, running from temporary quarters starting 13 September 1995 and then permanently from 27 November 1997.
