licence by licence
Licence By Licence, State By State
This is a publication, not a place to play — I take no bets, hold no deposits, and run no gaming machines.
opening date
From Gaming House to Casino Floor
The term derives from casa in Italian, meaning a modest house raised for enjoyment rather than for living in. The European gaming rooms at Baden-Baden and Monte Carlo laid down the pattern: chandeliers above the card tables, a cage for the cashier, house rules baked into the architecture. What Australia copied was the shape of the thing, not the schedule. For much of the 1800s gambling houses ran without any formal licence — put up with, never truly approved — until every state settled on drafting a Casino Control Act of its own. The device that rewrote the maths was the machine on the floor: slots to Europeans, pokies to Australians, a term already widely spoken decades before a single licensed casino housed one. It was Tasmania that issued, in the early 1970s, a legal casino's very first licence; everyone else took ten years to decide whether to join in.
States watched Tasmania for a decade before granting their own licences.
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Two Openings, Twelve Days Apart
In Perth, Burswood Island Casino threw open its doors on 30 December 1985 as a resort tower designed from scratch — at that moment the biggest casino Australia had, and by report the world's third-biggest. A dozen days before it, on the 12th of that same month, Adelaide's casino began operating within the Adelaide Railway Station of 1928, where the ticket hall and sandstone arches were reworked instead of torn down. New construction in one state; salvaged stone in the other. A decade of watching Tasmania lay behind both licences, yet the buildings looked nothing alike. As for the lever itself — chrome, sprung, laid out in pieces here under the studio lamps — it wasn't tied to either venue. It was off-the-shelf kit, and the tax on it varied with the floor it stood on, whether a club's, a hotel's, or a casino's, and those varying rates did more to decide where the machines ended up than any demand from players.
Three Companion Records
The guide sets out how a Casino Control Act differs from a Gaming Machines Act, state by state. The myths page corrects claims I hear repeated — about federal licensing, about a single national tax rate — that the statutes themselves contradict. The glossary defines terms from house edge to regulator, cross-referenced against the Act that first used them. None of this is advice on where to play; it is a record of how the licence came to exist.
Send a Correction
I am one researcher working from Hobart, cross-checking dates against gazette notices and the Casino Control Acts themselves. If you hold a primary document that corrects a date on this site, or a clause I have summarised imprecisely, write to me. Corrections are logged against the page they affect, not quietly buried.