Daylight Savings Time

In case you are wondering why we have so many night-time photos, it is because a) Brisbane is not as far south as Calgary is north and so we do not have the big swing between light and dark that one gets as one nears the poles, so the nights are longer here and b) Queensland does not have Daylight Savings Time.  It gets light here at about 5 am...and not twilight, but LIGHT!  The birds start their screeching about 30 minutes before the sun comes up (the little buggers) and it is HOT when we walk in to work.  Joanne has had a 7:45 am sunburn and Jim now wears shorts to walk in.  It is hot and sunny.  The early daylight at this latitude also means that we get early nightfall.  When we first moved here it was totally dark by 6:15, but now it gets dark at around 6:30pm, and it is always twilight when we are walking home.  The nights here are warm, so it is quite nice to be out in the 23ºC weather, with 80% humidity.  We have yet to wear jackets on the way home, or anytime since we landed.

Daylight Savings Time is a hot-button topic here.  Queensland, the Northern Territories and Western Australia do not have Daylight Savings Time, but the ACT (Canberra), New South Wales, Southern Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales do.  This means that if one travels south (towards Sydney) along the Gold Coast, one goes from a Queensland resort town to a NSW resort town, sometimes only 100's of metres apart, and loses an hour.  There is now talk of creating a SE Queensland district that will have DST.  Whenever we are asked if all of Canada is on DST, we answer "Everywhere except Saskatchewan, and there they don't have it because of the farmers not wanting to upset the cow's schedule".  This is the same answer that they have here!  Since when have cows been running the world?  They don't even pay taxes!  We have been told that the DST issue goes to a referendum every year or so, and if it does, you know where our vote is going....vote Yes to DST!