Tonight we set our clocks back to return to standard time, and as such here’s a discovery I made through Twitter: according to this tweet (external link), it’s only in 1895 that Melbourne joined Sydney on GMT+10, which is indeed Sydney’s “true” time zone (GMT+10’s central meridian, 150°E, runs through the middle of Sydney). Before that, Melbourne time ran 20 minutes behind Sydney’s, as we’re at 145°E.

I think I’m much more opinionated than the average person about what time sunrise should be.1 When I’ve been to Sydney in the depths of winter, I’ve found their 7am–4:55pm daylight hours considerably nicer than our 7:35am–5:10pm at that time of year (I hate getting ready for work in the dark 😠). If we reintroduced Melbourne Time, we could get 7:15am–4:50pm which I think would be a big improvement even if we can’t actually shift the city further north for more daylight. On the other hand, our summer daylight hours don’t need to shift any earlier, so I guess the jump for DST would just have to increase to 1½ hours to compensate. (haha just kidding… unless? 🥺)2

As a bonus Twitter thread from the same guy, he also did one last year about New Zealand introducing a common, nation-wide timezone in 1868 (external link) (although not the UTC+12 that NZST is today). And apparently a New Zealander invented DST, so if you hate it, blame him! 😉

  1. Pretty simple: no later than the time I have to get up on a weekday, and preferably no earlier than 6am, although the longer the day the less I care about sunrise being before 6am. Just don’t pull a Brisbane, which has daylight hours of 4:45am–6:15pm in mid-November… ↩︎

  2. Please don’t @ me with any “wElL aCtUaLlY DST iS rEaLlY bAd FoR pEoPlE wItH sLeEp DiSoRdErS aNd YoU’rE a MoNsTeR wAnTiNg tO mAkE iT wOrSe” takes because this is not a formal policy document and I’m allowed to wistfully long for things that cannot happen OK ↩︎