In an edited extract from One Last Spin, Drew Rooke explores one of the world’s most intense, accessible and ruinous forms of gambling: Australia’s poker machines

Tim Freedman, the lead singer of the Australian rock band The Whitlams, turns heads when he enters the Coopers hotel in Newtown, in inner Sydney. Wearing an open brown-leather jacket over a plain collared shirt, dress pants and leather shoes, he looks more like a teacher than a rock star. He has thick eyebrows, short greying hair, wrinkles beneath his brown eyes, and a thin band of stubble from ear to ear. As he takes a seat across the table by the front window, the bartender nudges his colleague and points in our direction.



Back in the 1990s, before Freedman was famous, pubs were where he spent most of his time and performed most of his music. “I essentially lived my life and conducted my career in pubs,” he says. He remembers there being live music in several venues in Sydney’s inner west every night.

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Freedman had never seen poker machines before they were allowed into pubs in New South Wales in 1997. It didn’t take long before he “started raising my eyebrows at the amount people were putting into them in one afternoon”.

The removal of stages, bars and dining areas to make space for more poker machines – a far more lucrative revenue source – fuelled Freedman’s concern. “Publicans thought, ‘Oh, this here’s the golden goose. Throw out the musicians, and fill the place with pokies.’ They thought all their Christmases had come at once. They really directed their businesses towards them for a few years.”

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He remembers at one point there was only a handful of spaces in the inner west where local musicians could play: “And this is supposed to be the music centre of Sydney.”

Freedman knew two people in particular whose lives were unravelling because of poker machine gambling, two of his closest friends and fellow founding band members Andy Lewis and Steven Plunder. “When I was calling the band up for a sound check, I’d have to get them off the pokies,” he says. “It was a new experience for me, because it used to be that I’d have to get them off the pool table.”

In 1996 Plunder died, and a year later Lewis left the band. Freedman stayed in touch with Lewis, whose gambling problems continued. “After Andy left the band in 1997 I knew that he was having trouble getting ahead financially because of the pokies,” Freedman says. “It was aggravating me. So I wrote a song about it – a little story about sitting [at a pub] down the road and seeing my friend play the pokies where we used to play music.”

Freedman released Blow Up the Pokies as a single in 1999. Set at the now-defunct Sandringham hotel – a live-music venue in Newtown – the song tells the story of a failing father locked in a “secret battle” with poker machines that were allowed in the first place so the government could say “the trains run on time”.

With its catchy melody and hard-hitting lyrics, the song was the band’s first major hit. It peaked at #21 on the charts, and propelled the Whitlams on to a national tour. Ironically, many of the packed-out halls they were booked to play were in large clubs housing hundreds of poker machines. “I felt like a Trojan horse,” Freedman says.

But the band’s newfound commercial success was overshadowed by tragedy. A year after Blow Up the Pokies was released, Freedman, while on tour in Canada, heard that Lewis had killed himself. “He basically worked all week and put his whole pay cheque through the pokies on Friday afternoon,” Freedman says. “Then he went back to his workplace and hung himself.”

Hearing the backstory to the song immediately triggers memories of the horrid situations of the many gambling addicts I have met. They all know the same despair, helplessness and self-loathing that drove Lewis to take his own life. The tragic truth, however, is that in a way they’re the lucky ones. There are far too many others (the exact figure will never be known) who, like Lewis, simply cannot cope, who find living with an addiction to poker machines too unbearable to endure.

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Australia’s poker machines are one of the most intense forms of gambling available in the world, radically different from the fruit machines offered in pubs in the United Kingdom, or the pachinko machines in Japan. They accept high-denomination banknotes (except in South Australia, where they still accept only coins), can be loaded up with thousands of dollars in a moment, can be played once every couple of seconds, offer enormous jackpots reaching into the tens of thousands of dollars, and – depending on which Australian state or territory they are in – allow maximum bets of either $5 to $10 a spin. If played at their maximum bet and maximum speed, they can easily consume $600 to $1,200 in an hour.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest If played at their maximum bet and maximum speed, poker machines can easily consume $600 to $1,200 in an hour. Photograph: Erin Jonasson/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

Australia’s two supermarket giants have a large stake in poker machines. Woolworths is the majority owner of the Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group, which owns about 400 hotels and clubs across Australia, and about 12,000 poker machines, making it the largest operator of poker machines in Australia. Coles’ stake in poker machines is smaller but still significant. Its parent company at the time of writing, Wesfarmers, owns 89 hotels and more than 3,000 poker machines.

The Productivity Commission’s 2010 report into the national gambling industry found only a minority of Australians – about 25% – play a poker machine once in any given year. Those who play poker machines regularly – once a week or more – account for only 4% of the adult population.

But this low popularity does not correlate to the machines’ profitability. In fact, poker machines are the lifeblood of Australia’s enormously profitable gambling industry. Of the $23.6bn gambled in 2015–16 – the highest per capita amount spent anywhere in the world – $12.1bn, or more than $600 each adult, was poured through poker machines in clubs and pubs ($5.2bn was lost in casinos). If current trends continue, this figure can be expected to grow. It was up from $11.5bn in 2014–15 and $11bn in 2013–14.

For context, in 2015–16, $2.9bn of Australia’s total gambling losses were spent on racing, and $920m was spent on sports betting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One Last Spin: the Power and Peril of the Pokies, a book about pokies in Australia by Drew Rooke, is out in May through Scribe. Photograph: Scribe

Poker machines are regularly described by their manufacturers, operators, some politicians and some of the general public as “entertainment”, akin to movies, video games and television shows. This is an appropriate description for some who play them; many gamblers I spoke with in gambling venues told me they played poker machines “for the thrill”, “for a bit of fun”, or “to pass the time”. But for others, poker machines are far from entertainment. They are more like a destructive drug.

• This is an edited extract from One Last Spin: The Power and Peril of the Pokies by Drew Rooke, which is out now in Australia through Scribe