Bright Lights: what one woman's 25-year gambling addiction really cost

[Music] um so [Applause] [Music] it was like early 90s 1992 i think when they first came to australia i remember because it was just after my mum died we'd go to the pub for drinks on a friday night you know me and the girls from work um we'd sit around the table and discuss how stupid our boss was and we'd drink you know so that was kind of a nice way to win the week well one night we walked in and there were these machines that we'd never seen before they were just lined up against

the wall where the stage used to be these machines they had screens on them and numbers and cute pictures on them i thought they were just like mechanical toys you know like video games and so we gave it a go i mean everybody did chuck a buck in and waste five minutes kind of thing it was just a stupid thing that people did at the pub but i just watched this happen more and more over time and i thought this is actually pretty boring instead of us just sitting around the table talking like we used

to they just sat around these machines it's all they wanted to do and we didn't talk anymore and so i just sort of stopped going i remember the first time i went back there by myself it was 25 years ago but i remember i had an argument with my husband i don't even know what about really something dumb and i just wanted to kind of brush it off and so where do you go it was one place i could go out where it was kind of socially acceptable to go on my own like i could

just sit around and have a play on these machines and it wouldn't be that weird and well i won i won like 190 something bucks that first time [Music] and i was amazed that you could actually win money that that could happen i mean that was it really looking back because from then on it only took like five or six weeks for me to be there every single day and i joked to myself in those first weeks you know that this was kind of like my job now because i would just go in and win

and i thought hey maybe i don't have to go to work anymore [Music] for a time you really believe that you're in this kind of community like the people at the pokies are actually your friends but it's a it's a fake community really and they're not your friends because for you to win somebody else has got to lose lots of people have to lose [Music] by about 1995 96 i did start hearing about people losing their savings maxing out credit cards losing everything you know their houses on poker machines and you're sitting there in the

same place as the rest of them next to them even and you're thinking well that'll never happen to me as if i'm way too smart for that and then you start losing of course most of the time you're losing actually and often there's not even a jackpot big enough to win back what you've lost and you're still there and that's when you finally realize that you're in serious trouble i'd be lying awake in bed at night and i'd have this bloody music in my head like you know the pokeys music and it would just go

round and round and around [Music] and when you finally do falsely the dreams [Music] so but even then after all that no one ever called it an addiction i mean these machines were built purpose built to catch people to mesmerise to hypnotize to mind bend the way their bells and whistles go off and the way they do big ringing sounds the bright lights but we didn't know that the day my husband left i remember the relief you know i didn't have to sneak around so much anymore at the heart of my addiction my husband didn't

matter my friends my own children they didn't matter even the night that my husband left i knew i would kind of have to feed the beast but i only had 85 cents left in my bank account so i went upstairs and into my daughter's room and it was just sitting there [Music] and this little voice came from behind me i just kind of panicked and there i was on my hands and knees picking up five and ten cent pieces off the ground my seven-year-old daughter is out of bed helping me handing me fistfuls of change

[Music] and that was it i just lost it i bolted out of there ran down to the garage just sort of sat there for ages [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] you