Pokies

Rows of overturned gaming tables stretch towards the large windows along Victoria Road at the former Balmain Leagues Club, Rozelle, photographed in 2015, five years after the venue closed. The words gaming terrace are still legible through grime and cracked glass. Graffiti tags cover each window panel, one pane fractured into a spiderweb pattern, another marked with a crude face beside the letters HVB. Sunlight reaches the debris-strewn floor between the tables. The club building opened in 1957, purpose-built on the prominent corner of Victoria Road and Darling Street, Rozelle, approximately four kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. It was constructed as a registered club to serve the Balmain Tigers rugby league football club and the surrounding community. The registered club model sustained the Tigers across the latter half of the twentieth century, funding football operations through bar, dining, and gaming revenue. Balmain Rugby League Football Club had been formed nearly fifty years earlier, at a public meeting of approximately 600 people at Balmain Town Hall on 23 January 1908. The club was one of nine foundation clubs in the first NSWRL season. By 1957, the Victoria Road building gave that history a permanent social address: a ballroom, a main bar, function rooms, and a gaming floor. The club closed on 28 March 2010. A NSW Government notice to vacate had been issued in connection with a proposed Sydney Metro transport corridor that was never ultimately built on the site. The property had been sold the previous year for $1, with the buyer assuming reported debts. By the time these photographs were made in 2015, the interior had deteriorated significantly. Copper wiring had been stripped throughout. Floorboards in the ballroom had buckled with water damage. The building would go on to survive two fires, a government compulsory acquisition that was subsequently reversed, and a voluntary administration before demolition was completed in 2024 and 2025. What the photograph records is simpler than any of that: tables built to take a wager, tipped over in a room that had stopped taking anything at all.