My mother, Margaret, died in 2018 at 75. It was a good death, all things considered. The very end was savage, as endings often are, but she was in her own home and on her own two feet until the final week. For a woman who’d smoked two packs a day all her adult life, who’d never exercised or even walked to the shops, who refused to drink water (“I’d spew!”) and lived on Coca-Cola, paté on toast, jubes and green olives from a jar – considering all that, she did OK.

During my mother’s final days, I had it easy. My sister, Lee, lived closer and is, to be honest, a more nurturing person. She’s caring. Patient. Lee is also better with money than me, but I thought I should at least attempt to help – so at the end, I took charge of Mum’s bank accounts. She lived on the pension and died with a run-down brick veneer villa unit in an over-50s complex, an old car worth close to nothing, and a small amount of cash.

We were surprised she’d left that much. Yes, she’d worked full-time for 50 years, six days a week, and through much of the 70s and early 80s made close to $40,000 a year – or almost $250,000 in today’s money. Once she owned a beautiful home in Brisbane, on a huge block, in a tree-lined street. She took three holidays that I can recall: twice to Melbourne to visit me, and once to Cairns. She never held a passport. Her best dress came from Myer; everything else was from Kmart. She never went to the theatre or even the movies; she didn’t eat in restaurants or drink alcohol. She left no expensive jewellery or furniture, she gave nothing to charity, she wore no makeup, she had no fancy tastes in anything.

So where did all the money go?

She gambled it.

When we were children, this meant the track, mostly at the Gabba dogs on Thursday nights or at the TAB where she worked, or, on her rare days off, via telephone betting. She knew the name of almost every dog and horse, every trainer, every jockey. I remember when my sister and I were little, she would drive us to the library at Carina and wait in the car, listening to the trots, while we chose our books. Then in the early 90s when pokies were legalised in Queensland, she fell hard. She would spend most Saturdays and Sundays by herself in those dingy rooms, sitting on a stool, chain smoking and pressing the buttons for hours, watching the lights, praying for the bells to ring and for coins to tinkle from the slot. Hours would pass. She wouldn’t eat or drink much, in case someone took her machine while she went to the toilet and it paid out.

It was more than a hobby. This was before mandated limits, and my mother gambled fast, ferociously, without any sign of fun. She grumbled. She swore and grimaced and cursed her luck and whatever club she was in and the way life was stacked against her. Watching her, I always felt she was hard at work at a job both difficult and unpleasant, as though she hated money and couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

Making money from gambling didn’t require her to speak differently or act differently or look differently.

I understand that addiction is a complex pathology, but as a teenager I judged her. I sometimes wondered if, were she ever prevented from gambling for some reason, she would have emptied the contents of her purse into the sink and set fire to it.

With the passage of time, I think about my mother’s gambling more generously. She was a woman of sharp intelligence and a poor education, someone who could calculate complex sums in her head, who left school in year 10 once she had enough typing and shorthand under her belt to make a living. That was what mattered: making a living. Your own money gave you a little power. My mother wasn’t consciously trying to become middle class. She despised anything stuck-up or fancy and was especially critical of people acting “above their station”. She wore thongs everywhere, she swore loudly in public, she bunged on ockerisms in a performative way. Many times – such as when I published my first novel – she said to me: “Don’t forget your place.”

All this working-class pride strikes me as the lady who doth protest too much. I think my mother was looking for something to distinguish herself, some kind of marker of her individuality, without the kind of striving she saw as being “up yourself”.

“Self-actualisation” is a term tossed around, but in practical terms, what does that mean to a woman like my mother? She had never been exposed to music or literature or any kind of artistic pursuit; the idea of travel was beyond her imagination. She thought people who did volunteer work were utter mugs. Now I think she was perpetually bored and frustrated, and longed for a fairytale ending where someone waved a wand and – lo! – revealed her as a powerful queen.

When people talk about working women in this country, they always mention the 1960s as the decade when everything changed – and that’s true, for middle-class women at least. Working-class women, like the women in my family, always worked. They worked in shops or on farms or factories or, like my grandmother, cleaning other people’s houses. There was no feminist revolution for them. Life continued as it always had.

My theory is this: my mother saw the windfall riches that came from luck as the only way to distinguish herself without needing her to pretend to be someone else. Making money from gambling didn’t require her to speak differently or act differently or look differently. She could still swear, still wear her thongs, still smoke two packs a day. She could dream of a bigger, richer life while remaining authentically herself.

Of course, she never won big. Gambling, at its heart, is about poor people making donations to rich people. My mother wasn’t lazy, and she wasn’t greedy. She spent all that time and energy and money. So what would she have done with all that imaginary money, had she ever won it big? I have no doubt what she would have done. She would have spent none of it on herself, of that I’m certain. She would have spent all of it on a car, or even a house, for my sister and me.

Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan (Hachette Australia, $33) is out now