Daylight saving

 I thought I might have a little rant about daylight saving.

 If you have ever lived in a place that has daylight saving you will know it has its pros and cons. For me, the pros have it. We had daylight saving in New Zealand, and the lighter evenings were our favourite part of the day. Here in Queensland, it is a taboo subject by most.

I can only speak from personal experience here, but in my view, and this may be somewhat blinkered, Queenslanders hate change. There is just something in their psyche that does not accept change readily. And you have to admit that daylight saving is a change of mammoth proportions.

They have had referendums about this in the past, and from time to time the subject rears its ugly head, but is squashed quick-smart.  Queensland did try it for one year, and they hated the fact that the curtains faded too quickly with the extra hour sunlight and apparently the cows hated being milked an hour earlier.

I have to admit that Queensland is a bit different in that the top of the state is totally tropical, with monsoon weather during the summer, while the southern area of Queensland, where I live, is slightly south of the tropic of Capricorn. 

One of the huge challenges of living around the southern border with New South Wales, is that NSW does have daylight saving. So you can have one street in the same city of Coolangatta in NSW having daylight saving and the next street in Queensland not having it, but being one hour behind. This is also a problem for so many workers who cross from one time zone to another. To get to work at 8 am, they must leave their home a street away at 7am.

 

Straddling the border. One foot in Queensland one foot in New South  Wales.
businesses in different time zones.

It also means that when you want to phone a business in NSW you have to call an hour earlier than your own time. So if you call at 4.01 pm you  won’t make it. They have all gone home. Of course lots of call centres are open 24/7, but then, many of them have been shipped over to India or the Philippines.

Okay back to the problem of daylight saving. You see it gets daylight here at the moment just before 4 am. And by the time we get to the shortest day, it will be around 3.30 am when daylight starts to blush the sky.  And just before that the dawn chorus starts. No one has trained the birds to sleep in, and we don’t have little birds that twitter in the trees, we have whopping great parrots that scream around, yelling at the top of their voice that it is time for breakfast.

Sulphur Crested Cockatoo...with a pair of lungs good
enough for Pavarotti.

 

Now you might say that solving this problem is a piece of cake, just put up some decent drapes. But people here in Queensland don’t have heavy drapes at their windows normally. Heavy drapes keep a house warm, and we want to keep our homes cool. So the norm is to have very light coloured lightweight folding blinds that have chinks in them to let the sunlight through and you can bet your boots that the chinks are right in the spot where your eyes are resting on the pillow.

There is no solution to this problem for me at the moment. House sitting means changing bedrooms and window shadings often.  At the moment my bedroom faces due East and catches the dawn in all its glory much too early for my liking. When we finally settle down in our own little nest, I am going to have solid blinds at my bedroom windows.