Australia's weird little time zone (2008)
howderfamily.com
howderfamily.com
I have learned something new about my country today, thank you kindly!
I think much of it is due to social and political history - only six states, the population of each of which is dominated by its capital city, and all of those state capitals are on the coast. Quite unlike US states, where the biggest city and capital city are very often different.
It might have turned out differently - what if New South Wales had moved the state capital away from Sydney, to somewhere like Bathurst or Orange or Dubbo? Or what if inland NSW (west of the Great Dividing Range) had been split into a separate state, with its own inland capital? Imagine this had happened 100 years ago - how different would Australia’s population distribution look today?
The averaging over the total area is a misleading statistical anomaly, as it is with, say, Alaska or Russia.
Some people think the state of Alaska is big. (it's 665,400 sq. miles)
The state of Western Australia is 1,021,000 square miles.
(This image is to scale, although many people can't believe it - https://www.facebook.com/theroadchoseme/posts/pfbid02YboSbqN... )
It's a bit strange that they made it +45 minutes from AWST. Every 15° of longitude east of GMT should be +1 hour and the WA/SA border is 14° east of Perth. Yep - it's a long way!
As for the statement in the article "A couple hundred people can probably come to consensus on just about anything, apparently even the complete departure from a standard time that the government say should apply to them. That doesn’t concern them. They set their clocks as they please. It’s such a small population that the authorities turn a blind eye and allows ACWST to continue albeit without official sanction."
It should be balanced by the image of a sign announcing the timezone, installed by the government. It's probably more accurate to say that they have the tolerance, at least, of the government, but not the sanction of state parliament.
Even lots of Texans don't really consider how far away West Texas is from the parts of Texas most of us live in[1]. There's a sign on the westbound side of I-10 just inside the TX/LA border that I love. It says
Beaumont 17 El Paso 857
Both are cities straight ahead, on the same road, in the same state.
[1] A simple majority of Texans live in either greater Houston or greater Dallas-Fort Worth. 70% of us live in either those two places or somewhere in the Austin or San Antonio areas.
The only big city west of those is El Paso, which has fewer than a million people in its entire metro area.
Pac coast to Texas: 800ish miles.
Across Texas? 877 or so.
Beaumont to Jacksonville (ie, Atlantic Coast): 784.
Canada joins the chat
Great restoration | maintainance crowd and a good get away for a three month caretaking sabbatical if you can swing it - I wrote a lot of geophysical code down there a decade and more back, solar panels, batteries, and a laptop tend to structure your thinking V coding time.
[1] https://exploreparks.dbca.wa.gov.au/site/eyre-bird-observato...
Was the weather insane? Queensland is bad enough in the summer haha
Summer had days that were like living in a fan forced oven. Not very pleasant.
Now I live in Tasmania, much more pleasant.
They have opportunities to volunteer there sometimes too: https://www.networkbirdlife.org/volunteer-opportunities/volu...
Summer there can be hot if the winds are driving desert air over the coast, but for my time there the weather was beautiful - a few gusty gale force squalls driven by southern winds with cutting rainfall .. otherwise between ~ 8 to 18 C degrees or so (comfortably above freezing, well short of summer temps.).
You can type the following to see the current time there:
$ TZ=Australia/Eucla date
Thu Oct 27 10:36:45 +0845 2022
It's a tiny little place, like a motel, post office and petrol station and that's about it. I've stayed overnight there a couple of times, and the stars are incredible - no light pollution at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile / Tom Scott
It might be tiny in Australian terms but not internationally. 340km is a very similar width to the UTC+2 timezone as it runs through Finland and the Baltic states, much wider than Portugal which has its own timezone (UTC+0), and just a little under the width of Bangladesh (UTC+6, almost completely surrounded by India at UTC+5.5). Ittoqqortoormiit in Greenland has a separate timezone for an area of around 100km width.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_Time
Geographically, France and Spain ought to be on UTC+0 too...
213 people have their own timezone.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/new-zealand/chatham-is...
Seems to me it would be annoying for the populace, and downright nightmarish for software developers.
If you want to sync with europe change at the same time as europe.
I can't remember the details, but in some countries the only legally acceptable date for the start of Ramadan is the direct observation of the new moon. Thus the day when Ramadan starts cannot be predicted in advance. Note that I believe this is the case mostly in the Gulf states, other Muslim-majority countries are fine to trust astronomical calculations.
(yes, Afghanistan and China share a border)
> Nepal Standard Time (NPT) is the time zone for Nepal. With a time offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of UTC+05:45 all over Nepal, it is one of only three time zones with a 45-minute offset from UTC.
I read somewhere that it was to make sure everyone knew that it was an independent country.
They're functionally identical, technically opposites, and I can't help feeling the reason is very, very similar.
Until one of the countries (or the EU) decides to get rid of the DST...
They do, but it's a) extremely short, and b) highly unlikely to be crossed on land, as it's along the ridges of very high mountains.
Surely the reason it exists is just because it does. Legally valid things done in this area are done on standard time - e.g. the polls close at 6:45 local time because they close at 6pm standard time. But it doesn't really matter what time two people meet when they say "lets meet at 2pm" and trying to change that would require an unwarranted intrusion and an unnecessary expense.
I'm told the area around Broken Hill is equivalently odd - although there's official boundaries for the timezone there (Yancowinna County, or somesuch) but there's also the actual boundaries that people use (depending on whether they agree that they're in Broken Hill or not). The expense and intrusion of trying to enforce strict timezone boundaries on boundary-area dwellers just isn't justified to the people who live near them and it isn't justified to the people in the capital cities. It's different in the capital city, or on the more heavily populated border areas (e.g. Tweed Heads/Coolangatta area) where you're more likely to have to do business with a stranger.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Australia#Anomalies.
New Zealand has a time zone with +45 minutes too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Standard_Time_Zone
Nope, apparently we also have:
– UTC+13:00 for Samoa and Tonga (standard time) and Fiji and New Zealand (daylight saving time)
– UTC+13:45 for Chatham Islands (daylight saving time)
– UTC+14:00 for Kiribati (standard time)
I think this is more about the population in the sliver, than the size of the sliver itself. Using NASA's population estimation site [1] it estimates a population of 213.
There's also an initiative to remove DST. If not for Covid, Europe would've already cancelled DST.
Exactly matching the sun day is not very important. It's more useful to have your time zones match your neighboring countries so that more people shared the same time.
They should have just formalised that timezone and moved parts of South Australia into it.
Although it'd be annoying living in a 45m timezone. It's annoying enough living in a 30m one when setting times with the rest of the world.
Prior to 1895, Adelaide ran at solar time, GMT +9:14. When time zones were introduced, they went for GMT +9:00, but changed to GMT +9:30 after only 4 years. This probably reflected the reality that more people in SA live east of Adelaide than west of it.
Meanwhile, Sydney only had to put the clocks back 5 minutes to move from solar time to GMT +10:00, while Melbourne had to move the clocks forward 20 minutes to get into the same time zone as Sydney. (Both changes happened in February, 1895.) If we're going to have half-hour time zones, Melbourne is in the wrong one; it should be in the same zone that Adelaide currently uses.
So, in summary, by solar time Melbourne should be 20 minutes behind Sydney's current time zone and Adelaide 46 minutes. As there is a substantial population living on the NSW–Victoria border, not putting Melbourne at UTC+9:30 makes some sense. The same isn't true of SA's borders with Victoria and NSW. And so, we ended up with the current compromise, adopted in the era when railways and telegraphs became dominant.
“Had” to Google whether that was a typo for 1985. It isn’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Australia#History: “The colonies enacted time zone legislation, which took effect in February 1895”
Also came across this tidbit as to why they have that half-hour difference (same URL):
“In May 1899, in a break with the common international practice of setting one-hour intervals between adjacent time zones, South Australia advanced Central Standard Time by thirty minutes after lobbying by businesses who wanted to be closer to Melbourne time and cricketers and footballers who wanted more daylight to practice in the evenings.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Australia#Anomalies also is a fun read, with
“The Indian Pacific train has its own time zone—a so-called "train time" when travelling between Kalgoorlie, Western Australia and Port Augusta, South Australia—which was at UTC plus 9:00 hours during November 2005 when DST was observed in the eastern and southern state”
For people at the western edge of the timezone, it's fine, because they're advanced compared to the sun by design. For people at the eastern edge of a timezone, they're somewhat behind the sun by design. So in much of Europe and the US, countries/states/counties that should be in timezone X are in timezone X+1. Spain is a leading example of that, but even France should be in GMT. And everywhere that uses daylight savings is an example for at least half the year, some are double examples.
In effect, the error is the decision that timezones should be centred rather than east-aligned.
At the tone, the Pacific Daylight Time will be...
It is very effective for getting work done around the clock and having oncall all the time without waking people up!