Belle Place talks with Michaela McGuire about her new work of true crime.

Your book hinges on the case of Anthony Dunning, the 40-year-old man who was pinned to the floor of Crown casino by security staff and who later died. Was it important to your book to establish a sense of who Dunning was?

It was important for me to establish a sense of who everyone involved was – Anthony Dunning; his two best friends who were with him that night at Crown; Matthew Lawson, the 26-year-old bouncer who decided Dunning was drunk and gave the order for him to be removed from the casino. My requests for interviews with all of the key players were denied, which I thought was fair enough. It was a painful enough ordeal already without having some writer stick her nose in.

I encountered Dunning only through the same six minutes of CCTV footage, which I watched on endless repeat as the trial progressed. I was able to observe everyone else through the nine weeks I sat in court, either on the witness stand, in the public gallery, or seated in the dock, and get some sense of who they were as people, but Dunning remained a 2D character to me. All of the security staff from Crown who gave evidence during the trial – with one glaring exception – said that Dunning had been aggressive that night at Crown, that he was verbally abusing the bouncers, that he pushed one of them. Dunning’s friends who were with him on the night said otherwise. I worried that I wanted to believe that he hadn’t displayed any violence and that I was siding with a dead man, simply because it was easier to identify with someone who only ever appeared to me on a screen.

I sat in on the preliminary trial of another patron who had been assaulted at Crown – whose wrist had been broken after they had been escorted out of the casino by bouncers – and I couldn’t stand this guy. I wondered what I would have thought of Dunning if he had been able to give evidence about what had happened to him. Maybe I would have believed that he had been spoiling for a fight that night.

A central thesis of Last Bets is concerned with the gap between a casino’s moral obligation and the law. Can you tell us more about this idea?

My interest in this case was sparked when I read that although Dunning was unconscious when he was taken by ambulance from Crown, and died in hospital four days after he was pinned to the casino floor by security staff, Crown never notified the police. It was Dunning’s two friends who had been there on the night who made the call. Later that week, a spokesperson for the police said that although Crown didn’t have any legal obligation to have notified the police, they ‘probably had a moral obligation’ to have done so. I found it extraordinary that there could be such a gap between what was legally required of the casino, and what almost anyone would regard as the morally correct thing to do.

That foggy gap is what I set out to investigate, and I was surprised by how often it came up in court. On one of the very first days of the committal hearing – a sort of mini-trial before the main event – one of the bouncers’ barristers quite gleefully pointed out that ‘this isn’t a court of morals’. It was fascinating to watch the lawyers neatly step around this idea, and try to twist it to their advantage.

There was also a lot of argument about whether the bouncers had restrained Anthony Dunning in accordance with proper casino procedures. It took the prosecutor to point out that the more relevant issue was whether what they had done was permitted under the law. As the trial progressed and more witnesses gave evidence, there was an acute sense of the casino operating somewhat above the law, or at least believing it was entitled to.

For a few different reasons, you felt an antipathy towards casinos before you even began writing the book. Was it difficult to keep your views objective when undertaking research?

That well-documented antipathy of mine towards casinos was actually part of the reason that I wanted to write this book. I’d worked as a waitress in the high-rollers room of Brisbane’s casino when I was at uni, and hated every minute of it. I’ve reflexively loathed casinos, and gambling, ever since but recognised that it was an adolescent loathing. It seemed lazy to say that of course I hated casinos, I used to have to wash out ashtrays in one seven years ago. I wanted to test and question whether my footing on the moral high ground was as sure as I thought it was.

I constantly questioned that bias throughout the book, and weighed it against new evidence that I encountered. I hope that by being so transparent I managed to be objective. Because I was so acutely aware of my pre-existing bias, I think I went out of my way to try to come around to casinos, to understand why so many people enjoy gambling. I interviewed a lot of professional gamblers as part of my research, and ended up being convinced that maybe it wouldn’t be as horrible to play the occasional game of poker as I’d thought it would be. David Walsh told me that I don’t give much away and he couldn’t get a read on me, so he wouldn’t be able to play poker against me. Maybe I should consider a change of career.

In Last Bets, a person describes the casino as ‘a place of mythology’, that upon entering a casino they ‘[buy] into some kind of personal myth, that they become somebody or something different to when they walked in’. This anecdote hints at the complexity behind gambling, an idea you flesh out well through the multitude of subjects you talk with in your book. How did you use these encounters – with David Walsh, or a Crown casino priest, for example – to establish a clearer picture of why people gamble?

I don’t personally have any compulsion to gamble, so in order to have any understanding of the psychology behind it I needed to seek out as many interviews as I could and approach the issue from all sides. A few years ago my uncle surprised everyone in the family by revealing that he was a problem gambler, and that was a real eye-opener for me. He was good enough to allow me to interview him for this book, and that really helped me to understand the issue on a personal level.

Gambling is an impossibly broad subject, so I focused my line of enquiry on that gap between morals and the law and the issues that came up throughout the court case. When a witness gave evidence that she had been sitting at a poker machine for half an hour, for instance, and the defence pointed out that she’d been sitting there for three and a half hours, that prompted me to seek out a problem gambling researcher and look into the psychology of addiction.

I actually arrived at a clearer understanding of why people are compelled to gamble when I accidentally got addicted to Candy Crush. I spoke to David Walsh about compulsion feedback loops, Skinnerian psychology, and why those famously horny rats are just like cocaine addicts.

Are there any works of true crime that influenced you when writing this book?

I re-read Janet Malcolm’s excellent analysis of a murder trial, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, trying to figure out how to make my coverage of a long court case remotely interesting. Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation has never been far from my side these past two years, and I made the mistake of re-reading Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man when I was at a particularly low point and very nearly set my computer on fire rather than continue trying to write this book. Anna Krien’s Night Games was published just as I’d finished writing up all my material from court and was ready to try and figure out how I was going to weave through the rest of my research. I figured I could just copy whatever she did, but then of course she went and started her book with the verdict. That wasn’t going to work for me.