Gambling Lesson

A few years after my fiasco with Galilee in 1966, I was living in Perth and playing pub pool in just about every waking moment. I got hooked when I teamed up with Keith, a workmate who claimed to have been Scottish snooker champion. I can find no evidence of that, but he was an outstanding player. When he was thirsty, he was capable of breaking and clearing the table without giving the other three players a single shot. Once he had his eye in, he enjoyed performing trick shots and entertaining the crowd. In those days in Perth pubs, you always played for the cost of the table and a beer. We drank for free for about a year.

Despite his ability to drink free beer as long as he wanted, Keith had a taste for expensive spirits and for backing losers at the races and those two failings had him almost constantly in debt. We were paid fortnightly and Keith always ran out in about three days. He would borrow from me until the next payday. On payday, I'd collect what he owed me before he had a chance to pay anybody else or to put a bet on any new sure thing. And I was careful never to lend him more than his usual pay packet in any fortnight.

I went to his home once, but his wife clearly held me responsible for his financial failings and threw me out on the spot. And after a while, I started to get itchy feet as I became increasingly aware that I had only put 3,400 km between me and my parents in Melbourne. I moved on to Darwin and I lost touch with Keith. But at least I was by then confirmed in my attitude to betting on horses.

A Horse to Remember

A weedy little bloke from some runt of a town in western NSW walked into a pub on a Carlton street corner one spring day. The regulars at the bar gave him the stare, but he went ahead and ordered a beer. His name was Kenny and he became a regular and some of the men started to recognize him. He bought beers for me and some mates and we got to ask him why he was in Melbourne.

This was not something he wanted to share with everybody, so he almost whispered it. "I'm here to back Galilee in the Cups," he said. This theme was constant for a week or two. He was an odd punter, always in the pub rather than at the racecourses or even the TAB. This was 1966, and this pub had never had a TV in the bar. But he kept having enough money to buy his share.

He disappeared on Caulfield Cup day, but was back with a major hangover and a lopsided grin the following Monday. Galilee had won and Kenny had won with the bookies. Over the next few days, my mates decided that Kenny knew something and decided they had to back Galilee in the Melbourne Cup. I was a student then, so the other guys elected me their representative to back the horse on Cup Day. I'd never been in a TAB or bet on anything, so this was a shock.

I did some reading and found that only five horses had won the cup double in the past 90 years. It seemed unlikely that it would happen this year. So I kept the money, avoided the TAB, drank as much as I could hold and discovered too late how treacherous horses and gambling can be when Galilee came home first. We never saw Kenny again, and I was lucky to see anything at all when my excited mates came to collect their winnings. I vowed to avoid horses and betting for the rest of my life. And I had to find a new pub.

Filter Stubs Toe Again

This is all over the news and the blogz, so I won't clutter the place up with URLs. The Conroy train to idiocy has been declared late due to some purported efforts to get it right, which appears to mean delaying it until after the election at least.

That counts as good news, although it's only a tiny step. Perhaps they will quietly abandon it after the election. Somehow, I don't think that will happen. So I suppose I'll have to start thinking about the cleanest way to opt out, as there seems little likelihood that Conroy will do a u-turn and switch it to opt-in.

When you consider that none of the bad guys will have to think about this—since all but the utterly insane ones would have opted out of showing their illegal habits to the government years ago—it's a bit annoying that the good guys now have to bestir themselves in order to opt out of the filter. At least there's no real rush and this can just go on my long todo list.

Part of the problem for me is that my spouse is a psychotherapist who has to deal with victims of child abuse and, less often, with the abusers. She has good reason to look for materials that, while in no way exploitative or deserving of special classification, could easily trigger imperfect software that was supposed to be "protecting" us all from the evil ones.