For several years, I stood behind the counter of a Lotto kiosk at Midland Gate, a shopping centre locals had nicknamed Hellgate. Located in one of Perth’s roughest suburbs, it was the sort of place that could make Sydney’s Mount Druitt seem almost like a gated estate. From there, I helped sell Australians the tantalising fantasy of instant wealth.
As a teenager, I had an unrivalled view of people’s superstitions, financial anxieties and, occasionally, the extraordinary luck that genuinely transformed someone’s life.
The kiosk had its regular customers, including plenty of lonely older men. They would shuffle to the counter, ask me to kiss their tickets for good fortune and promise to buy me a car or take me overseas if they struck the jackpot. Others wanted my birth date so they could turn it into a lucky number.
Needless to say, my involvement was never going to bring them romantic luck.
I eventually stopped counting the number of customers who told me, “Make sure you give me a winner.”
My imagined response was always the same: “Sorry, mate. I sold every winning ticket to the first 20 men who used that line today.”
Besides, if I had known which ticket would win, I would hardly have been earning $12 an hour behind the counter while politely pretending their joke was fresh.
Still, the most unfortunate piece of luck I encountered at the Lotto kiosk involved a customer who would eventually become my frequently criticised ex-boyfriend.
Former Lotto kiosk employee Sarah Brookes is pictured above.
In the 1990s, Midland Gate, pictured, was widely known as Hellgate and sat in one of Perth’s toughest neighbourhoods.
Office Lotto syndicates regularly descended into disputes over missing payments, while some customers became intensely loyal to the particular machines they believed were lucky.
He came in one day to buy a ticket and apparently took a liking to my smile — and to my rather memorable uniform: synthetic trousers paired with a loud patterned top that looked as though it had been bought by my nan at a Katies clearance sale and might induce a seizure.
I, meanwhile, was drawn to his enthusiasm for travel and his almost childlike excitement about life.
This was long before Tinder, direct messages or pocket-sized smartphones. Mobile phones were still the size of house bricks, so he returned the next day and asked me on a date.
Like so many lottery tickets, he seemed full of potential at first. In reality, he turned out to be a disappointing loss who cost me considerably more than he ever gave back.
Yet the most surprising lesson from my time behind the Lotto counter had little to do with lucky numbers — or with choosing a partner.
I was astonished by how frequently people won without even knowing it.
During slow afternoons, my colleague and I would search the bins for abandoned scratch cards. Many older Australians struggled to read the instructions or had difficulty seeing the symbols clearly, which meant potential prizes were sometimes thrown away.
Some customers glanced at their ticket, assumed it was worthless and discarded it immediately. Others scratched off roughly four-fifths of the card, decided the untouched section was unlikely to contain anything valuable and tossed the whole thing out.
Lotterywest has mastered one of modern Australia’s most effective marketing messages: presenting the purchase of a lottery ticket as both a gamble and a way to support the wider community.
We’d casually fish them out and discover $5 winners, $10 winners and the occasional ticket worth far more.
On a good day, we’d find hundreds of dollars’ worth of prizes that had been thrown away by people who spent every week dreaming of a windfall but somehow couldn’t identify one when it was literally sitting in their hands.
Yet even that level of self-sabotage paled in comparison to what happened when jackpots got really big.
There were the frantic jackpot days when people convinced themselves they had to buy their tickets early or they’d end up with the ‘bad’ numbers.
Maths has never been my strongest subject, but I’m pretty sure probability doesn’t care whether you bought your ticket at 8am or five minutes before closing.
Try explaining that to someone who’d been queueing since breakfast because they were convinced all the lucky numbers would be gone by lunch.
Lottery players are optimists by nature, but some treated random number generation like a Boxing Day sale, as if the winning numbers were sitting in a pile out the back and the early birds got first pick.
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There were customers who regularly confessed to accidentally running their multi-million-dollar dreams through the washing machine, leaving us to deal with mangled paper pulp and hoping the barcode scanner could somehow read a shredded ticket.
There were the regulars who became fiercely protective of ‘their’ terminal or the exact machine that printed their ticket
Nothing says ‘future millionaire’ quite like painstakingly piecing together a lottery ticket on the counter with sticky tape.
Then there was the syndicate drama. Office pools and family syndicates caused endless chaos.
Working the register meant listening to people argue over whether Cousin Bruce really paid his $5 contribution to the big rollover draw or watching someone try to sneak into a winning group after the numbers were announced.
There were also the regulars who became fiercely protective of ‘their’ terminal or the exact machine that printed their ticket.
If another customer stepped up to that particular register and won a small prize, they’d act as though their entire future had been stolen right out from under them.
Western Australians have a particularly intense relationship with lotto.
Maybe it’s because Perth doesn’t have pokies outside the casino. Maybe it’s Lotterywest’s near-mythical status. Maybe it’s the promise that every ticket somehow helps the community.
Whatever the reason, jackpots seemed to grip Perth in a way few other things could, turning otherwise sensible people into believers who genuinely thought the winning numbers might sell out.
Jackpots seem to grip Perth in a way few other things could, turning otherwise sensible people into believers who genuinely thought the winning numbers might sell out
And it’s big business. In 2025-26, Lotterywest returned more than $1billion to the community through grants and prizes.
Lotterywest, which has been around since 1933, has pulled off one of the great marketing tricks of modern Australia: persuading people that buying a lottery ticket is both gambling and community service.
We happily line up for a shot at instant riches while telling ourselves it’s all for a good cause.
So what did I learn from all of this? That the real product wasn’t a lottery ticket.
It was hope. Hope sold everywhere, but it sold especially well in Midland.
This was a suburb where people joked: ‘What do you call a Midland girl in a white tracksuit? A bride.’
It was the sort of place where you couldn’t really call yourself a Perth local until you’d been barked at by the local icon Mad Dog while minding your own business.
But behind all the jokes was a community full of people who wanted something better.
Midland icon Mad Dog is pictured shopping at Midland Gate where he regularly hangs out
Hope that next week would be different. Hope that debts would disappear. Hope that work would become optional. Hope that luck would finally call your number.
For a few dollars, a lottery ticket let people imagine a different life. Not forever. Just until the numbers came out.
Every week, they bought the dream all over again. Every now and then it paid off.
Most of the time, though, the dream cost more than it paid.
Which is why, looking back, I would have spent that weekly Slikpik money buying Vanguard ETFs instead.
Had I invested $7.40 a week rather than chasing Division One, I’d have tens of thousands of dollars more today.
Not quite a lottery jackpot but unlike Lotto, I’d actually be guaranteed to win.