FW: time in southeastern Western Australia

[Paul Eggert]

> From: LIVINGSTON Alex [mailto:lial at mac.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 11:57 PM

> Apologies if this has already been covered. I checked the latest tzdata
> file and there seems to be no mention of it.

We have some comments in the australasia file about Eucla; did you
see them?

> Now that Western Australia is observing daylight saving, the question
> arose whether this part of the state would follow suit. I just called
> the border village [+61 (0)8 9039-3474; from online white pages] and
> confirmed that indeed they have, meaning that they are now observing 
> UTC+09:45.

The amusing thing about this is that the Eucla area originally split
off from Western Australia because they didn't want the hassle of
changing their clocks.  At least, that's what the sheriff of Madura
told Rives McDow a few years ago.  But we don't know when this switch
occurred.

Anyway, thanks for tracking this down; your evidence convinced me that
the Eucla phenomenon is real enough that we should document it.

However, we don't know when the Eucla area originally diverged from
western Australia.  For now, I guess I'll assume Eucla matched the
rest of western Australia from the time that standard time was
introduced in 1895 (and yes, Eucla existed back then!) until the first
year of WA's experiment with daylight saving time ended in March 1975;
then I'll assume Eucla simply set the clocks at UTC+08:45, and never
budged again until this year.  Obviously that 1975 transition is just
a guess, and I'd like it to not be a guess, so if you know anybody at
Eucla who'd know when this earlier transition actually occurred,
please let us know.

> they have a clock in their kitchen with a Dymo label on it stating
> "Eyre Std. Time" (I took a picture).

I'm afraid that is a little _too_ specialized, even for me; we don't
have the resources to record every family's timekeeping
idiosyncrasies.