‘The Gambling Evil’, they called it. The headline and catchphrase first appeared in Australian newspapers in the 1880s, imported from the United States and Britain. It was popularised here in the following decade and reached its zenith before World War I. Evangelical preachers drew crowds to churches and public meetings to denounce ‘The Gambling Evil’—always capitalised. They had good grounds for doing so.

Gambling was omnipresent in colonial Australia, chiefly in horse racing, along with the other evils fulminated against: the drinking evil, the smoking evil, the evil of theatres, of working and playing on the Christian Sabbath, and—in almost every form—of sex and particularly prostitution, the one they euphemistically called ‘The Social Evil’.