I have learned something new about my country today, thank you kindly!
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... )
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.
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.
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.
Canada joins the chat