The Jezabels’ Hayley Mary Reckons Its Time Pokies Got The Fuck Outta Pubs

Being a singer, it is expected that my interest in the Proudly Pokies Free campaign would mainly concern Sydney‘s live music scene – which is one of the most exciting in the world right now. Seeing venues filled with pokies at time when we should be opening more is devastating, but it’s not the main reason behind my disdain for pokies. 
Like a lot of musicians, I worked in bars, including a lot of pokies rooms, while starting out. I watched lone players sit for hours at the machines.
I nodded when they explained to me how they’d ‘worked out the system’ or ‘had a feeling’ about a particular machine paying out. The player won occasionally of course, but most of the time I spent hours counting the winnings from the machines that filled only the space of a small city lounge-room.
In 2006 a man started coming into the hotel I worked in. He tipped generously, wore Armani suits, a Rolex, and expensive jewellery. 
Gradually, his tips got less generous, his clothes less showy and even his wedding ring disappeared. One day, on my lunch break, he approached me on the street, dishevelled, and asked me for a dollar. He didn’t seem to recognise me as the girl who’d been serving him the past few months. I asked if he wanted it to put it in the pokies. He looked sheepish, so I refused. 
He asked why. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, as an employee, but since I wasn’t officially working, I told him I felt he had a problem with gambling. He rushed off. When I got back to work he had reported me to my boss. I was given a warning and reminded it was none of my business. There is a voluntary exclusion policy and it’s their prerogative to take it. 
His was one of hundreds of stories, but I recall it because my personal disempowerment against pokies was established that day. As an employee, and as a musician, but also more broadly it feels similar. Somehow their pervasiveness feels out of our hands, untouchable, pre-decided, as if we are an inferior species up against some Dalek who is designed by algorithm to suck cash.
I support the Proudly Pokies Free campaign because it gives me something positive to do about an enemy which is depressingly quiet. And that is celebrate venues which are pokies free; venues that give us space to do those human things a Dalek can’t: socialise, tell stories, play music and dance. 
Because if Sydney’s night really is to belong to lovers again, it’s this language of love and celebration that our city needs to reignite.
Check out Proudly Pokies Free at their website or on Facebook.

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