Clovelly hotel was packed yesterday for the Anzac day two-up session. They’d set up two grandstands so that hundreds of people could play and watch. Weirdly it’s the first time I’ve ever actually seen two-up played. Took a little while to catch on to how it works, but the whole raucousness of it is infectious. I never realised the betting was so haphazard – basically if you want to bet heads, you hold up the amount you want to bet next to your head, then you find someone in the crowd who’s willing to make the same bet for tails and you work it out amongst yourselves. Guess that could be why the game’s only legal one day a year, it’s pretty hard to enforce the rules and could quite possibly end up in fisticuffs if the general atmosphere of the day wasn’t so chilled.
Clare Fletcher 