David Sygall, The Sydney Morning Herald
Regardless of any political fix, the misery persists. One woman who seemed to have it all talks to David Sygall.
Even now, more than 10 years after the ordeal began, Kaye* can’t quite get her head around it.
She may never know what drove her to put about $200,000 through those flashing, whirring machines. Why she threw away years of hard-earned wages and stole from people who trusted her, some who loved her. She can never get back the relationship with the man she thought she would marry. And she may never entirely escape the feelings of shame and regret for lying to loved ones and colleagues. For lying to herself.
It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that Kaye is winning the battle. There is money in her bank account. She can walk past a pub without going in and emptying her wallet. She can buy groceries and come home with the change, get her hair done and pay her rent. She can hold down an honest relationship. Suicidal thoughts have lifted with her depression. What matters now is that Kaye is finally escaping the soul-destroying grip of poker machine addiction.
”It’s still a bit weird,” she says through moist eyes after recounting her extraordinary story. ”I have all this money. I keep thinking, ‘Is this what normal people have?’
”I’m really starting from scratch. It’s hard. But I know I’m smart and I know I can do it. It’s important that I don’t think too much about what I lost to gambling because looking back just makes me hate myself. I have to look forward now. I have to build a new life for myself.”
Kaye may be a common gambling addict, yet she is far from the stereotype. She is 36, well educated and well groomed. She grew
up in housing commission accommodation but says her family was happy and had everything it needed. She learnt the value of money and worked around school hours to buy things she wanted. She was sporty, popular and, like her four siblings, finished year 12. An older sister did a PhD, she says admiringly, and paid for it herself.
There were problems. Like many teenagers, Kaye struggled with an eating disorder, which became worse at 24 when her father died from a mystery lung disease. Her friends had left to study at university and Kaye became lonely. She started going to the pub and putting a few dollars in a poker machine.
”It was just an escape for a little while here and there,” she says.
Down but motivated, Kaye moved to Sydney to work in hospitality. She found that her new colleagues were into pokies and one night she decided to join in the fun. It was the night that dictated the next decade of her life.
”After work we’d often go to the pub for a drink,” she says. ”Some of the guys would go to the pokie room and I remember thinking, ‘How can they put so much money in?’ They’d put in $50, $100 … Then, one night, I decided I’d give it a go.”
A novice, unaware this pokie cost a dollar a spin, Kaye deposited $50 and within minutes the machine started chirping. She thought she’d won $80, but the person next to her said it was $8000. It was a great buzz. Within an alarmingly short time, it changed the way she interpreted playing pokies. The joy of the flutter was replaced by an irresistible compulsion.
”It wasn’t about fun any more,” she says. ”Straight away it carried a different meaning altogether. I wanted that feeling again. It just overtook me.”
The cost was serviceable at first. But soon Kaye was regularly losing her $800 weekly pay packet. The consuming nature of gambling addiction is evident in her recollections. She recalls very clearly the details of that initial big win, as well as several highly emotional incidents. But, mostly, her memories are jumbled. She shudders as she recalls the feeling of walking out of gaming rooms empty-handed time and again. It’s the same when she explains how she lied repeatedly to her flatmate sister about why she was broke. She said twice that her wallet had been stolen – she’d thrown it away to avoid being caught out. As the debts grew, she would go to cash-advance shops, show a pay slip and be granted money at exorbitant interest. Everything could be fixed by another big win.
”My anxiety was growing,” Kaye says. ”I started stealing other people’s tip money … I wasn’t brought up to do things like that. It just wasn’t the real me. I was physically doing these things but it was the ‘gambling me’, not the ‘real me’.”
Keep reading Kaye’s story here: My life as a pokies addict: I lost everything I loved.
