Australia is so unfathomably big in practice. I live in the same state, I have driven tens of thousands of kilometres in this state. Thousands in one trip at a time, I consider myself well travelled in this state, and I have never entered or even heard of this time zone.
I have learned something new about my country today, thank you kindly!
I have this sense that Australia and Texas have this "failure to truly grasp scale" thing in common, though obviously Texas is much smaller. Sparse population density probably has something to do with it.
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.
That most Australians live so close to the coast is not solely due to rainfall/etc. In many parts of the country, the fertile coastal strip extends hundreds of kilometres inland.
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?
Australia is simultaneously one of the most urbanized countries, with most of the population living densely. Population is denser than some European countries like France or Germany, for example.
The averaging over the total area is a misleading statistical anomaly, as it is with, say, Alaska or Russia.
That's weird, I did a roundtrip of Australia a few years ago and reading the title of the article knew exactly what it was talking about.
I distinctly remember one of the roadhouses having a clock with a sign "yes this is the correct time"
It's my fun fact when people ask about my timezone! I live in Perth, and then we talk about this, it's a good little icebreaker if meeting them for the first time :).
Agreed. I've lived in WA for most of my life and never knew this either.
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!
South Australia's timezone is already weird, being somewhere between Ballarat and Melbourne iirc (in the winter). It was the first timezone set outside of the territory it contains. The 45 minute offset is just to find the midpoint between the timezone on their east and the timezone on their west.
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.
If anyone gets down that way I recommend the somewhat isolated Eyre Bird Observatory.
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.
It's on the southern coast of the Australian mainland so pretty much as cool as Australia gets outside of Tasmania or the few mountain peaks we have.
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.).
Eucla is one of my favourite places in the world. It's mentioned on a lot of huge-scale maps, purely because it's a 5-letter place name in the middle of a vast empty open space.
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.
I have to toss this classic video on the issues with timezones and programming. The sheer amount of growing exasperation as the video goes is hilarious.
> ACWST is observed only in a tiny sliver... a total length of about 340 kilometres.
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.
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.
I recently learned that Morocco observes daylight saving time all year... Except for Ramadan. So sometimes they use standard time in winter, sometimes in summer.
Seems to me it would be annoying for the populace, and downright nightmarish for software developers.
Can confirm, in my last job we supported customers in Morocco and our software dealt directly with timezones, so it was a ... challenge.
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.
It looks like this ended because they moved to permanent UTC+1 now... Casablanca is at 7.6 degrees west, nearly on the border between theoretical UTC and UTC-1. I understand relations with their African neighbors aren't great, so this is presumably to synchronize with European neighbors? It looks like they do still drop back to UTC for Ramadan.
Hardly permanent. They’ll be matched with Portugal and Canary Islands most of the year rather than mainland Spain, but Spain in winter but then for Ramadan at a changing time of year they’ll match with Azores unless it’s winter when they match with Portugal.
If you want to sync with europe change at the same time as europe.
China has a single timezone, despite the fact it is a little wider than the "Lower 48" States of America. It's heavily biased towards the eastern coast.
> 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.
Ireland technically doesn't mirror the UK's timezone. Irish Standard Time is UTC+1, and we go back an hour for winter. Unlike the UK, which is at UTC+0, and goes forward an hour for the summer.
They're functionally identical, technically opposites, and I can't help feeling the reason is very, very similar.
Yes, if it wasn't for the over-riding desire to avoid a time difference between Northern Ireland and Ireland, we may have ended up with a performative GMT+0:45 timezone.
My fave time zone oddity is that Guam claims "Where America starts its day" but turns out the tip of Alaska does. And the International Dateline in general is strange
It is apparently widespread in Xinjiang outside of the biggest cities, to the point where bus timetables are written in unofficial timezones. In some cities you have know whether the business uses local time or standard time to understand the opening/closing hours (although I guess it's usually pretty obvious). To a large extent it is political so I guess probably it's being eradicated as part of the current genocide.
You know it's Australia when 340 x 100 kilometres is described as a "tiny sliver". For comparison, that's larger than Belgium or Maryland, and nearly twice the size of Israel.
If you’re interested in this odd Australian time zone, Lord Howe Island (10km long, population 350, hundreds of kilometres east of the mainland) also has its own time zone for half the year.
My guess, as an Australian, is that if the government ever decided to get rid of it there would be a large and vocal petition to keep it. Just because it's funny.
It's already unofficial, so the government can hardly get rid of it. Apart from maybe being convenient for the locals, I suspect the real reason is that it benefits tourism. It gives tourists another reason to visit and it generates publicity (here we are discussing it on HN). If the government does have an opinion it would probably be support, in that it generates tourist dollars and doesn't inconvenience anyone, apart from a few people who might miss out on happy hour in the pub.
How many tourists are going to drive that far? It's a 13 hour drive from Adelaide, 12 hours from Perth. I've only ever heard of people driving to Perth, stopping at a roadhouse, and getting weirded out by the clock not matching the time they thought it was. And if it was attracting any significant amount of tourism, you'd think they'd be able to support a population of somewhat more than 200 people scattered over hundreds of square kilometres.
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.
You wouldn't drive all that way just for the timezone, but tourists already driving across/around Australia would probably stop just to say they have experienced the odd timezone. My take is that it's part of a bigger picture of having an aura of "oddness", as being independent is part of the outback mythology.
The government. They're not opposed to the timezone, it's just not established in law. Probably helps to know you're entering a region where people harmlessly ignore a certain law, and probably makes the people who live their feel like their contribution to the state is taken seriously, so the sign only hurts the state budget once every now and again.
>This is quite rare, something found nowhere else except Nepal and in a few small, isolated corners of the globe. Visitors entering or leaving ACWST have to remember to set their watches in the proper direction either forward or back by 45 minutes.
Another programmer fallacy about time zones I garnered from the article is it is always known what time zone you are in. Or time zones have definitely geospacial boundaries.
There's no people, and it's an inhospitable place... so if a clock ticks in the most back of the outback, and nobody is around to observe it, does it even matter?
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.
I never noticed how many time zones Australia has. China is similar in size to Australia, and has just 1 time zone. That might be going too far, but surely just three time zones UTC+8, UTC+9 and UTC+10 without DST should be enough.
Australia is bigger than Europe. Time zones are about changing the clock time to match the sun time as you move across the earth. Moving farther means you have to change it more to keep them in sync: therefore, more time zones.
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.
No - east-west Australia stretches further than eastern Ireland to western Ukraine.
And that’s an opinion, not a fact. Time zones are just a way of estimating when people in a location will be around and having a way to communicate who you’re using as a reference. You’re free to use UTC today, if you want to - but it’s not generally useful if you also have to manually map out “x is in England so he would be at lunch 2 hours earlier than me, but y is in Belarus so after my 4pm he will be leaving work for the day”
There was an attempt maybe 10 years ago to move South Australia to EST (the same as Sydney/Melbourne). For the vast majority of inhabitants this would have been fine (almoythe entire state population is concentrated in the capital) but it failed because it was a new thing and because of people at the western border.
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.
The fallacy here is to assume either Adelaide or Melbourne are in the correct time zones with respect to the solar day.
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.
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.”
“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”
There's a lot of pressure, in every modern democracy, to have the timezone at least not behind the sun. It's so easy to sleep in, I guess, and so those of us stuck inside during working hours want at least some leisure time outside.
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.
I thought bout that at the time and preferred pushing an extra half hour away from Sydney. It corrects the half-hour minor inconvenience, while putting sunrise at a better time for more of the state, and more in line with what is normal in the eastern states. The interstate business hour compatibility arguments of the past don't seem to really hold in the modern era, but people getting up for school and work is still the normal.
Growing up in Illinois in the '70s that was the "time and temperature" number. It was also the fake number you gave out if people asked and you didn't want them to get your real number.
My American experience with Australia is that the distance and time zones is a huge issue. They're effectively a half day apart from the US, and pingtimes are way higher. You wake up there and your family is just finishing work.
It is very effective for getting work done around the clock and having oncall all the time without waking people up!
I was just talking about this! But this isn't my favorite weird time zone, which goes to ... and here the name eludes me ... a defunct time zone where, for at least two years, they changed it incrementally each day to match the sun.
Tzdata intends to be accurate since 1970, but Windows has fewer timezones so it couldn't possibly be as accurate. There is also a historical extension to tzdata somewhere. (Tzdata, used by Unix, has a model that asks what timezone offset rules this place uses at some time, and collates timezones based on common answers: whereas Windows models change by saying that some place switched from one pre-existing timezone to another and only asks what timezone offset rules this place uses now.)
I have learned something new about my country today, thank you kindly!