FW: time in southeastern Western Australia
I'm forwarding this message from Alex Livingston who, after sending it, has subscribed to the time zone mailing list. --ado -----Original Message----- From: LIVINGSTON Alex [mailto:lial@mac.com] Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 11:57 PM To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: time in southeastern Western Australia Apologies if this has already been covered. I checked the latest tzdata file and there seems to be no mention of it. I have been meaning to write this for nearly four years; it was just on four years ago that I drove along the Eyre Highway, which passes through eastern Western Australia close to the southern coast of the continent. I paid particular attention to the time kept there. There can be no dispute that UTC+08:45 was considered "the time" from the border village just inside the border with South Australia to as far west as just east of Caiguna. There can also be no dispute that Eucla is the largest population centre in this zone, having a population of "40 or 50" (from memory what the proprietor of the roadhouse said when I asked him); it even has named side streets off the highway, and a very modern meteorological observatory and office. The other settlements, Cocklebiddy, Madura, Mundrabilla, and the border village, have much smaller permanent populations (around a dozen at most). So if a new zone were to be added to the tz database it should be called "Australia/Eucla". To back up my assertions I was going to refer to photographs I took of the three clocks at the border crossing (showing, Perth, local, and Adelaide time, respectively) and of the clearly "official" sign (galvanised-steel posts and frame, well-cut rectangular sheet-metal plate with rounded corners, stencilled lettering, and reflective paint) proclaiming "Central Western Time" that is seen just after leaving Caiguna heading east, but I have not published them yet and I do not have the time to check them now. (I think the sign also says, in smaller lettering, "Advance Clocks 45 Minutes".) This zone is also shown on the excellent map at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Timezones_optimized.png (obviously based on the CIA time-zone map). "Central Western Time" is mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone, where an estimated population for this region of 200 (according with what I would have guessed) is also given. (Unfortunately the phrase "Western Central Standard Time" is used in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Australia to refer to the same thing.) 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. There is one more curiosity to report about this isolated part of the world. The old Eyre telegraph station, just behind the coastal sand dunes southeast of Cocklebiddy, is now run as a bird observatory as well as a weather station and guest house. Its permanent population is 2 (a caretaker couple). I stayed there for a night on my way through and noticed that they kept a time different both from Perth and "the highway" (phrase used by caretaker; see below); they have a clock in their kitchen with a Dymo label on it stating "Eyre Std. Time" (I took a picture). It was UT+09:00, meaning a whole hour ahead of Perth, making their checking and reporting of weather data (which the Perth weather bureau expects to be done according to Perth time) simpler. I have just called them [+61 (0)8 9039-3450, also from online white pages], and they too have advanced their clocks with the rest of the state, putting them on UTC+10:00 and maintaining their one-hour difference from Perth. As far as I'm concerned this warrants another time zone, Australia/Eyre, despite the tiny permanent population! I seem to remember that what matters to this list is what time people actually keep, not statutory status. I hope the hour or two I've spent preparing and writing this turns out to be of some value.
From: LIVINGSTON Alex [mailto:lial@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.
On 2006 Dec 09, at 08:56, Paul Eggert wrote:
From: LIVINGSTON Alex [mailto:lial@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.)
Originally sent 2006 December 09 16:13:35 GMT+11:00, but did not make it to list. On 2006 Dec 09, at 08:56, Paul Eggert wrote:
From: LIVINGSTON Alex [mailto:lial@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.)
LIVINGSTON Alex <lial@mac.com> writes:
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.
Thanks for mentioning this. In this case, I'd say a simpler assumption is that Eucla has been at UTC+0845 since the introduction of standard time in 1895, and that it has observed DST using Western Australia rules. Something like this: Zone Australia/Eucla 8:35:28 - LMT 1895 Dec 8:45 Aus CWST 1943 Jul 8:45 AW CWST It's still just a guess of course...
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
Yes, you're probably right. Still, we tend to not bother with single weather stations and the like (e.g., the weather station on the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire) so we'll probably omit this one for now. Anyway, thanks again. It is nice getting authoritative info like this. I did find one copy of the minutes of the ordinary meeting of council in the Shire of Dundas, which used the phrase "EUCLA TIME" to refer to the time zone in question. See <http://www.dundas.wa.gov.au/council/public_documents/2005%20minutes/3septemb...>.
No sense in putting up with inaccuracies in Wikipedia, when it's so easy to correct them. I just changed that page to include some of the information provided by Mr. Livingston. -- Gwillim Law
-----Original Message----- From: LIVINGSTON Alex [mailto:lial@mac.com]
(Unfortunately the phrase "Western Central Standard Time" is used in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Australia to refer to the same thing.)
The Associated Press has been reporting that Pulaski County, Indiana is going to switch from Central to Eastern Time on March 11, 2007. Here is one place to find the article: http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070207/LOCAL190108/7020... If you read the article carefully, you will see that it's just hearsay. An unidentified DoT official told an Indiana state senator, and he told the press about it. I was unable to find any reference to the decision on the DoT website. -- Gwillim Law
Thanks for the heads-up. I guess they'll jump forward by two hours at 02:00 on March 11? The AP report doesn't say. Quite possibly the DOT rule, whenever it's published will be ambiguous; it's been ambiguous in the past in similar situations. I guess we'll need a new entry America/Indiana/Winamac, just for Pulaski County, Indiana. I'll research its pre-1970 records (Indiana has always been a real zoo) and try to come up with a complete entry for it soon.
participants (4)
-
Gwillim Law -
LIVINGSTON Alex -
Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] -
Paul Eggert