A blisteringly hot November evening. Diana Ross, Tom Jones, Human Nature. A quarter-tonne of lobster, fireworks, stuntmen. It was 1997, and the opening of Star City, Sydney’s first casino, a complex described by The Age as “Las Vegas meets Miami with dollops of the Australian outback, the Great Barrier Reef, Luna Park, and kitsch thrown in”.
Almost three decades later, Star is under new ownership and preparing for a hard reset. It has been a turbulent history. First the COVID-19 pandemic, then a high-profile investigation that found the casino was rife with money laundering and criminal organisations, have left it adrift. The high rollers are gone, management has turned over twice, and the casino’s owner, Star Entertainment, has all but handed itself over to an American operator that it had repeatedly spurned before running out of money.
