About time daylight saving in Tasmania

Tasmania pioneered Australia’s post-World War Two usage of daylight saving by unilaterally adopting it in the summer of 1967 for a six-month period as an emergency energy saving measure. One irony of this move is that it was in 1967 that the atomic clock was adopted as the world-wide device for the measuring of the fundamental unit of time, the second. Thus Tasmania’s use of daylight saving moved it ahead of the rest of Australia, but at the same time it was a step backwards into the solar-mechanical time-keeping era. Nevertheless, Tasmania has a special connection with the use of daylight. The central focus of this paper examines the history of that connection and places it in an international (as well as a national perspective) by presenting some of the more prominent elements of the wider history of daylight saving generally.