Four decades on, has Perth’s big casino gamble paid off?

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It was a social event unlike anything Perth had ever seen, with thousands of unusually well-dressed punters quietly waiting in a line that snaked from Burswood Island all the way down Bolton Avenue to Great Eastern Highway.

Just a year earlier, the land those first-nighters were standing on was a rubbish dump, which was transformed into the Burswood Island Casino in a breathtakingly brief time —the Burke Labor government was anxious to class up the city for the upcoming America’s Cup — and ready to open its doors on December 30, 1985.

What is less known is that, before Perth’s glitterati frocked up for the first night, there were two “soft openings” in which workers involved in the construction of the $280 million Burswood Island Casino — the third-biggest in the world at that time — were given fake money and invited to put the army of recently trained croupiers through their paces.

Croupiers and crowds at the casino’s soft opening night for members and family of the BLF on December 27, 1985.

Among those on the front line on that crowded curtain-raiser was 22-year-old David Littler, who months before had quit his job as a boilermaker in Naval Base to learn how to deal cards and spin a roulette wheel, joining the 3000 others drawn to the Casino in much the same way as the young are lured by the mining industry.

“We had only seen the gaming tables and all the glamour associated with it in movies,” says Littler, a current gaming floor manager who is one of nine employees that have been with the organisation since day one.

“It was especially exciting for me because I couldn’t wait to get out from under the hot tin roofs and come home with clean hands.

“We’d trained hard – for months we had been attending classes on St George’s Terrace – and there had been two soft openings, but we were all still a bit nervous on the big night.

Crown Perth gaming floor manager David Littler.

Littler looked a million bucks that night – along with all the other croupiers – because they were dressed and drilled by former Victoria Park international model Lorette Spicer, whose job in the first years of the casino’s operation was making sure Perth’s stab at sophistication matched the glamour crowds know from James Bond movies.

“The architects had given the casino an Art Deco look, so it was my job to match those uniforms with the decor,” Spicer says.

“They wanted the croupiers to wear gowns, which is pretty hard when you are hiring so many people. And let’s face it — we’re Australian, and we don’t naturally do glamour.

“I would stand at the top of the stairs as the croupiers would arrive and inspect them before they went on to the floor.

“And if their nails were chipped or broken I would send them back down again.”

Meanwhile, Spicer’s great friend Ann Roth was beavering away behind the scenes as the casino’s public relations and events manager.

In the lead-up to the opening, Roth and the driving force behind the casino – storied West Australian businessman Dallas Dempster, who’d forged an alliance with the Malaysian gaming operators Genting Berhad – had visited gambling operations around the world to be prepared for any problems that may arise.

“Cheats and underworld types arrive early in the life of a casino for obvious reasons,” Roth says.

“Thankfully, we had none of those problems. I ended up spending most of my time dealing with the Builder’s Labourers’ Federation, who were causing a lot of problems during the building of the casino and delayed the opening of the hotel.”

So strict were the dress standards in the casino’s earliest days, that former advertising executive Diane Whitely recalls arriving for a business meeting and being marched around by security guards.

“It freaked them out that I turned up in jeans and I wasn’t going to postpone the meeting,” Whitley says.

“I had just moved across from Sydney and I told them that people there wore jeans to the opera. They did know what to do so the manager grabbed two security guards to come with us.”

Spicer says that those strict rules were relaxed within a year of the opening because many well-heeled guests were arriving with clothes that were much more up-market than what the locals wore but did not follow the dress code, such as sneakers without logos.

“Things came to a head when I tried to explain to a Japanese man that he could not have logos on his sneakers,” she says.

Crown Theatres group general manager Judy Vince.

In the four decades since, the casino has gone through several changes of ownership and name changes — it is now Crown Perth in line with its sister complex Crown Melbourne — and survived several damaging legal wrangles to evolve from a gambling mecca into a full-blown entertainment precinct, with three hotels, an array of dining options and a 2300-seat theatre drawing crowds across the spectrum.

A key player in that transformation is Judy Vince, who in 2009 moved from Tasmania to manage Burswood Dome, which since opening in 1989 had hosted some of the biggest artists in the world (most famously Michael Jackson in 1996).

Vince is bursting with stories about her time overseeing the celebrity influx, such as the day in 2014 when she was told Lady Gaga wanted to “make an entrance” for her army of fans, aka her “Little Monsters”.

During her stroll through the lobby of the Meltropol on skyscraper-high stilettos, Lady Gaga popped into the gift shop, and her security slammed shut the doors to keep out her worshippers, leaving the American superstar trapped inside with Perth communications specialist Kylee Payne.

“I tried to leave, but Lady Gaga insisted I stay,” Payne says.

Lady Gaga meets and greets fans at Crown in August, 2014.

“We browsed together as she flung item after item on the shop counter. She then exited the store to greet her Little Monsters and left the minder to play for the lot.”

Two years later, Vince received another call from Live Nation to announce that Prince would be arriving after his RAC Arena for one of his famous after-party sets at the Crown nightclub Eve.

“It was late and everyone had left,” she says.

“There were only about 30 of us left. At about 2pm he arrived, sat down at the piano and said, ‘I want you to turn off your phones and just listen.’

“For the next hour he did all of his best-known songs. Only a few weeks later he was dead. It was just incredible.”

In more recent years, Vince’s focus has been on musicals, with Crown Theatre now one of the precinct’s major draws.

“When I started we would do one or maybe two musicals a year. Now we are doing five, six or even seven musicals a year,” Vince says.

“Perth is now a really big market for musicals, which means we are getting all the big productions.”

Crown’s expansion is continuing, with a new dining district dubbed the Urban Food Precinct to open in February, and the upscale Nobu and Rockpool are about to be joined by popular foreign names such as Side Piece Pizza, the modern sushi outlet Tekka Bar and Burgers by ES.

“The theatre has a symbiotic relationship with the rest of Crown’s offerings,” Vince says.

“Audiences come for a great show and stick around for a meal, or they’ll come for lunch or dinner and realise there is also world-class entertainment.”

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