With the exception of an uneducated, and usually unsuccessful flutter on the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s richest horse race, Sam Rose was not a gambler. He long ago arrived at the conclusion the horses he followed, followed other horses. In all the years a casino existed in Darwin, he had never so much as dropped more than a dollar or two in any of the numerous poker machines that occupied one end of the main gambling room.
The casino was a place, Sam believed, expressly designed to separate the tourist, and indeed the many locals, who followed each other like sheep through the doors each day, from their hard-earned cash. He could never accept that poker machines, and indeed gambling in general, could have anything other than a negative effect on those who indulged in such foolhardy pastim
