Maybe it's because I'm from that part of Indiana that wants so desperately to be Chicago it shares the same time zone...but it took me a whole ass second before I noticed how awful this was.
I had a long distance relationship with an Australian once. Neither of us could keep track of what time it was for the other. Especially since she was waking up when I went to bed and vice versa.
Tried to explain to a UK friend that one of Canada’s provinces has a special timezone that is 30 minutes later than its adjacent province and they thought i was bullshitting them for like 20 minutes. This was before smartphones.
The short answer is because longitudinally part of the state/territory comes under +9 and part of it doesn't and the governments of those areas wanted more daylight. Because Australia is very, very wide.
Nor does Queensland, they're seasonally very different to those of us in the lower half. They have a wet and dry season as they're more equatorial, whereas those of us before have more standard seasons and therefore DST.
There’s apparently also one city along the timezone border that chose a different timezone, so driving through the town you’d pass through three different timezones
The thing to understand is that all of the Australian states and territories low key hate each other and ppl don’t want to make it easy to phone interstate out of the blue
I (Australian) sometimes have to find the time of a past event on a Minecraft server, which keeps logs in local time, and was once hosted in Lithuania but then moved to UK, but sometimes Lithuania has daylight savings when Australia doesn't, then translating to PST for our mostly American user base
I think people underestimate how fuckin big Australia is. Like Cairns and Hobart are roughly the same longitude but the Latitude difference means sunset is almost hours apart today. So why would we not do different time zones?
I used to live in +9.5 and my work product had to be labeled in GMT, so I was forever subtracting that screwy 30 minutes. "Twelve minutes minus thirty, borrow an hour and leave forty-two."
People that live around the border between Queensland and NSW go crazy this time of year. When daylight savings ends, the southern states will change to match the northern again.
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It works. Otherwise you end up like China, with the sun rising at 10 in the morning or whatever.
Also, Australia's a way bigger place than some people realise.
https://www.howderfamily.com/blog/australias-weird-little-time-zone/
Observation: With the states are this large, we rarely cross a border.
But yeah, mate, we're smashing. Very few killer bushfires here in NSW this summer so far. Here's hoping!
This changes for most of the country cause of day light savings going on and off. But my state specifically doesn't even do DLS so we're stuck.