An Australia Powerball family win worth $28.40 AUD (roughly $19.64 USD) was enough to send one Melbourne household out for ice cream, after a run of bad luck and an insistent 11-year-old persuaded his mother to buy her first lottery ticket in years.
Melissa Noble, writing for Business Insider, described a month that included a bout of COVID, her mother’s hospitalisation with a lung infection, a major water leak at the family’s Melbourne home, and a collision that damaged her car. It was her son who suggested entering the $60 million AUD Powerball draw (approximately $41,470,000 USD).
How a dummy ticket became the family’s lucky charm
Noble and her son walked into a lottery shop, where the clerk printed an eight-game dummy ticket to demonstrate how the game works. Looking down at it, Noble noticed the numbers matched a string of family birthdays and ages, covering her children, husband, parents, and parents-in-law.
She bought that specific ticket on the spot.
Australian Powerball requires players to match seven main numbers, drawn from a pool of 1 to 35, plus a separate Powerball number drawn from a pool of 1 to 20, according to the Australian Powerball comparison guide. Matching all eight is the only path to the jackpot. The game runs across nine prize divisions in total, with Division 1 reserved for the jackpot and Division 9 sitting at the lowest end of the prize table.
The Australia Powerball family win that almost wasn’t
On draw night, the family gathered around the television. The first three numbers called matched tickets in Noble’s hand: 27, then 5, then her youngest daughter’s age. At that point, her son tried to manage expectations, explaining that all seven numbers plus the Powerball would need to match on a single game panel to claim the jackpot. Noble told him to be quiet.
Three of the next four numbers did not match. The Powerball itself did.
Punching the numbers into the online checker afterwards, the family found they had scored two Division 9 results, the lowest tier of win tracked by Oz Lotteries. The combined prize: $28.40 AUD.
Noble’s seven-year-old daughter cried. She had been expecting $60 million.
‘Yes… $28.40, to be precise,’ Noble told her, with a laugh. To soften the blow, Noble suggested perhaps another family had needed the jackpot more.
A small prize, a family outing, and a shift in fortune
The $28.40 went on ice creams for the whole family. Noble wrote that her daughter’s smile made it worthwhile, even if the mental note she took away was to avoid involving children in lottery excitement again.
For context on just how modest a Division 9 result is: the prize structure at The Lott, the official retailer for Australian Powerball, places Division 9 at the bottom of the nine-tier table, with higher divisions requiring progressively more matching numbers to claim larger sums.
Noble said she does not plan to buy another ticket. Since the draw, though, she reported receiving two pieces of positive news about the Melbourne property, and concluded that the lottery outing may have marked a turning point in the family’s luck rather than a financial windfall.
Whether the numbers will keep falling her way is the only question left open.