Two-up history and glossary: the dates, the diggers and the words of the ring

Where did two-up originate?

Nobody can point to the year two-up began, but the records narrow it down. Writing for the ANU in April 2022, Bruce Moore described “new evidence of similar games in northeastern England and in Ireland”, and suggested the word kip probably came from Dublin. RSL Queensland and Wikipedia both name pitch and toss as an ancestor.

An older line is often quoted from David Collins’s Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, published in 1798. It describes convicts in 1794 who, “instead of pence, tossed up for dollars”. That is gambling on a tossed coin, but the passage has no second coin and no name, so it isn’t a record of two-up itself.

Wikipedia places the two-coin game on the goldfields of the eastern colonies in the 1850s, and Kalgoorlie’s tourism site says it spread with the gold rushes. The first firm date comes from the dictionary: the Australian National Dictionary records “two up” from 1884, and the kip turns up in The Bulletin a year later.

Two-up timeline: the dated records

Each row below rests on a dictionary, a museum record or an Act. Where a row relies on a secondary account, the source is named in the row, and the full list sits at the foot of the page.

The Broken Hill game has its own page on two-up in Broken Hill, including the council authorisation that keeps it running all year.

The diggers’ game

In the First World War two-up travelled with the AIF. A glossary of soldiers’ slang compiled in 1921–24 calls it “the most popular game in the A.I.F.” and adds: “Large sums of money were won and lost”. The Australian War Memorial holds a photograph of Australians playing it at Ypres on 23 October 1917.

An AWM account from the 2/12 Commando describes the game as its diggers played it in the Second World War. The ring was “an 18- or 20-foot radius circle clearly etched in the dirt”, and the coins had to go up at least 10 feet. The boxer took a commission after three heads and again after six.

The spinner could toss the kip and take the money, or keep spinning. The kip held two or three pennies depending on the game, and players favoured Edward VII pennies, the baldies, because the bald king made heads easy to read. The gear has its own page on the kip and pennies.

How two-up became part of Anzac Day

The AWM dates the custom precisely. By the mid-1930s, it says, “dawn vigils, marches, memorial services, reunions, two-up games – were firmly established as part of Anzac Day culture”. Moore adds that returned soldiers played two-up after the Anzac Day march, so the game grew up alongside the day’s other rituals rather than apart from them.

Custom came well before the law. Moore wrote in The Conversation in 2022 that two-up “was always illegal, because the game is an unregulated form of gambling”. In his account, “from the 1980s it became legal in most Australian states on Anzac Day”. The Acts on our timeline show the pace: South Australia in 1995, NSW in 1998, Queensland in 2012.

Queensland shows how long the gap lasted. When the 2012 amendment passed, the minister said two-up on Anzac Day had been “technically illegal, police have traditionally turned a blind eye”. Each state’s exception still differs, as our page on why two-up is illegal most of the year sets out. For the day itself, see two-up on Anzac Day.

Where “come in spinner” and “swy” come from

The call to spin was once “fair go”. Moore traces the phrase to the Queensland shearers’ strikes of the 1890s, when it also entered two-up, while “come in spinner” only joined the game in the Second World War. Swy, from the German zwei for two, appears in Green’s from 1911; the AWM notes it was the diggers’ name for the game in the Middle East.

The call has since titled a novel and a television series. Wikipedia records Come In Spinner, a 1951 novel by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James set in wartime Sydney, and an ABC miniseries of the same name first shown in 1990. Moore used the phrase for his 2022 history of the game and its language.

Crossword setters use two-up words too. If a clue asks for another name for two-up in three letters, SWY fits; the three-letter two-up paddle is the KIP.

Two-up glossary: 27 terms

Definitions draw on the Liquor & Gaming NSW rules, the Australian National Dictionary Centre, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, the AWM and GambleAware NSW. The entries for odds and odding out follow secondary descriptions from Wikipedia, Wizard of Odds and GambleAware NSW.

Moore’s book records more than 140 words of the game, so this list is a start rather than the whole vocabulary. If you’ve heard a ring term we haven’t listed, send it through our contact page with the place and year you heard it.