Casino Funds Regional Card Game Archive in Public Library
When the municipal library of Ballarat, Victoria, announced in February 2024 that it had secured outside funding to digitise and catalogue its collection of pre-Federation card game manuscripts, few expected the money to come from the online gambling industry. The initiative, which ran from March through August 2024, resulted in the preservation of 214 handwritten rule books, dealer instruction sheets, and privately printed card game manuals dating from the 1860s to the 1920s — materials that had sat in acid-degrading folders in the library's climate-controlled basement for decades. The project was backed in part by https://spinmacho-au.net/, an Australian-facing online casino platform, which contributed $18,500 toward staff wages, archival materials, and high-resolution scanning equipment.
The collaboration came through adda.org, a reference and culture portal that maintains a dedicated section on the history of card and table games. The site had been in contact with the Ballarat library's special collections librarian, Nora Hendricks, since late 2022, when she submitted three articles on nineteenth-century whist culture in regional Victoria for publication. Those pieces attracted significant reader engagement, and in mid-2023 adda.org's editorial team began discussing whether the collection itself could be made accessible beyond the physical reading room.
How the Project Took Shape
The practical proposal was straightforward. adda.org would host a dedicated sub-section presenting the digitised materials, with editorial context written by Hendricks and two contributing researchers from the University of Melbourne's history department, Dr. Liam Caruso and Dr. Fiona Ayles. The library would retain full ownership of the documents and their digital copies. A corporate sponsor was needed to cover scanning and cataloguing labour — roughly 340 hours of work across six months. SpinMacho, whose Australian operations focus on online casino games including digital card games, agreed to fund the project after being approached in October 2023.
The agreement was deliberately narrow in scope. SpinMacho's name appeared in a single funding acknowledgement line on the adda.org project page, with no promotional text, no logo placement within the archival materials, and no involvement in editorial decisions. "We're an online casino — pokies, blackjack, baccarat," said Daniel Pryce, a spokesperson for SpinMacho's Australian marketing division. "Card games are genuinely central to what we do. Funding access to their documented history felt like a more honest use of a sponsorship budget than a banner ad."
The collection itself was divided into three categories by the research team: private household rule books, which were often handwritten adaptations of commercially published games; dealer and croupier instruction manuals associated with the goldfields-era saloon trade; and printed ephemera such as score cards and betting slips. Of the 214 items catalogued, 31 were identified as potentially unique — meaning no duplicate or near-identical document had been located in any other Australian or British archive consulted during the project's research phase.
What the Archive Revealed
One of the more unexpected findings concerned a handwritten manual recovered from a deceased estate in Sebastopol in 1971 and donated to the library without significant documentation. Dr. Caruso's analysis suggested it was a croupier's working guide for a game that combined elements of vingt-et-un and a regional German card game called Einundzwanzig, apparently adapted for use in a specific Ballarat establishment sometime between 1878 and 1885. The manual included margin annotations in two different hands, suggesting it had been passed between at least two workers.
The project's digitised outputs were published on adda.org's dedicated page in September 2024, formatted for both general readers and academic citation. Each of the 214 items received a brief catalogue entry, with 38 selected for fuller editorial treatment — extended notes, contextualised imagery, and transcriptions of selected passages. The page attracted just over 9,000 unique visits in its first four weeks, according to figures shared by adda.org's editorial director, James Moorfield.
For the Ballarat library, the practical gain was a fully catalogued, climate-independently accessible collection that had previously required an in-person appointment and physical handling of fragile documents. For adda.org, it represented the first time the site had published primary source archival material at this scale. For SpinMacho, the return was a credited association with a verifiable cultural preservation effort — modest in scope, but specific in a way that generic online gambling sponsorships rarely are.
The gambling industry's relationship with cultural institutions remains complicated, and single projects of this kind do not resolve the underlying tensions. What the Ballarat initiative did demonstrate, in specific and measurable terms, was that a narrowly defined collaboration — one document collection, one six-month window, one clearly stated funding purpose — can produce a concrete public outcome without either party overreaching the terms of what was agreed.
