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.
I have learned something new about my country today, thank you kindly!