time in southeastern Western Australia

[LIVINGSTON Alex]

On 2006 Dec 09, at 08:56, Paul Eggert wrote:

>> 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?

Yes, I did; I should perhaps have commented on them earlier (see below).

>> 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.

While in Madura I asked for "the sheriff" and only got bemused looks. I 
also asked how many people lived there and got the answer "11". There 
is a lot more about Rives McDow's report that is hyperbolic if not 
misleading. The town of Eucla is some 13 kilometers (see 
http://www.nullarbornet.com.au/towns/eucla.html) from the WA-SA border 
on the WA side, so I can only assume that the clock changing that the 
alleged "sheriff" spoke about had to do with residents' trips across 
the border into SA, perhaps just to the Border Village, which seems to 
be regarded as actually straddling the border, as there are two entries 
for it in the Australian white pages 
(http://whitepages.com.au/wp/index.jsp), one under "Border Village 
Motel Caravan Park Roadhouse" with address in SA (although the name of 
the highway is misspelled as "Ayre") and one under "BP Travellers 
Village Eucla" with address in Eucla, WA. The phone number given for 
the two is the same, and has the form of a WA number. That the address 
of the latter is given as "Eucla" suggests that, although separated 
from the town by 13 km of apparently completely undeveloped semi-desert 
(apart from the road between them), it counts, for postal purposes at 
least, as part of Eucla, and perhaps it was having that "part of the 
town" on a different time that the Eucla residents got fed up with.

It is clear, too, that the two-and-a-half hour difference between WA's 
and SA's times only applies while SA is observing daylight saving and 
WA is not. For the next three years this will only be the case for an 
hour and a half once a year. (Also once a year for an hour and a half, 
the difference will be only half an hour.) For the bulk of the time the 
difference is an hour and a half.

Whether any of the population centres that observe "Central Western" 
time amount to "towns" or not, there are more that three of them, and 
their combined population is many times more than 10.

I also have doubts about the claim made in the australasia file, 
interpreting http://www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/~awatkins/null.html, 
that the 'locals call this time zone "central W.A. Time"...'. The page 
referred to uses that designation for it, but it does not explicitly 
claim that that is what the "locals" call it, and it is not what the 
sign just east of Caiguna (emblazoned with "Central Western Time Zone") 
would lead one to believe.

I would point out as well that whatever proportion of Eucla ever was in 
WA still is just as much. It can only be said to have "split off from" 
the rest of Western Australia, along with a few other settlements 
extending a few hundred kilometers farther west, in a time-keeping 
sense. WA's eastern border follows 129 degrees east longitude exactly 
for its whole length (though I wouldn't bet my life on it).

> 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.

I tried phoning the Eucla Amber Motor Hotel [+61 (0)8 9039-3468], but 
Toni there couldn't help me. She referred me to the Eucla office of the 
Bureau of Meteorology [+61 (0)8 9039-3444], which I phoned and left a 
recorded message with (it is Saturday afternoon). I personally doubt 
that either experimentation with daylight saving in WA or its 
introduction in SA had anything to do with the genesis of this time 
zone. My hunch is that it's been around since well before 1975. I 
remember seeing it noted on road maps decades ago. Being the hoarder 
that I am, perhaps one day I'll dig one up, but I'm not going to make a 
special point of looking.

(I got a call back from the Eucla met. office and just finished an 
hour-and-fifty-minute [!] conversation with David Ingram there. Among 
many other things, he confirmed the population of Eucla at about 40, 
and gave me a couple of names and phone numbers of people he suggests 
would be better able to answer questions on time-keeping history; more 
later.)

>> 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.

I take your point, but, and I don't expect this to persuade you, it 
would seem to be a tradition of the observatory, not the "family" that 
lives there, since the caretakers (as far as I know always a childless 
couple) are appointed and employed by some organising body, and are 
generally replaced at least every year or so. It is extremely isolated, 
being reachable only via a very, very rough, track that is not plain 
sailing even for a heavy-duty SUV, or by boat to a sandy beach. I had 
them pick me up from the carpark at the southern end of a well-kept 
gravel road. (Sorry if this is too much information.)