For the last three years, every summer like clockwork, a gnawing sense of anger begins to stir inside me.
As the humidity increases through November and December, so too does my rage at Queensland’s baffling decision to press ahead without daylight saving.
I thought perhaps this frustration would ease the longer I lived in Queensland, but this will be my third summer here and I’m only becoming more and more bitter.
I never imagined I would become a Queenslander. I grew up in a leafy part of Sydney, moved to Melbourne in my twenties for work, before taking up a role in the Canberra press gallery where I met the man who would lure me north and become my husband.
Like many southerners I harboured a bit of snobbery about the sunshine state and laughed along as my friends joked that I was moving to a metropolitan backwater where cane toads and parochialism reign.
Daylight saving myths busted0:30
When it comes to that time of the year we all have our own feelings on the subject but here are some of the best myths about turning your clock around for daylight saving.
Yet Brisbane has totally surprised me. I have come to love this city over the last few years, so much so that I wouldn’t dream of trading in my little Queenslander, located just a few kilometres from the city, for the overpriced and exhausting rat race of Sydney.
That is, apart from the half an hour every morning in summer between 4.45am and 5.15am when I’m ready to pack my bags and move south again.
Because even before the clock ticks over to 5am, the sun has begun flooding through our bedroom window, the dog has woken with the birds and decided it is play time, and the kids have begun to stir.
It’s exhausting and uncivilised, not to mention totally inconvenient when you need to travel interstate and must be up at 3.30am just to make it to a morning meeting.
Even on ordinary days, when you finally get the kids off to school around 8.30am, the sun is already scorching, the humidity is suffocating and you feel like you need a second shower before you’ve even stepped into the office.
But the worst part about not embracing daylight saving is that we miss out entirely on the gorgeous long twilights of summer.
We have the perfect climate to enjoy long, balmy summer nights on our decks, where the kids play in the garden or the pool until long after 7pm, while the adults enjoy a glass of wine and cook something on the barbecue.
Instead, it is dark by 6.30pm, so we spend our summer nights inside in front of the television with the air conditioning going fullbore.
I have spent hours trying to debunk the myth to interstate family and friends that Queensland is backward, and trapped in the past. But in summer it becomes very difficult to do that when we are, quite literally, behind the rest of the country.
Economically, not aligning the clocks with NSW and Victoria makes absolutely no sense, some studies have put a $4 billion a year price tag on Queensland’s stubborn refusal to get on board with daylight saving.
The Neuroscience of Why Sunlight Might Affect Mood 1:15
Daylight Saving might have a perk: Researchers think spending more time in the sun might help boost your mood. An uptick in serotonin in the brain might be the cause.
The numbers of calendar mix ups and wrongly scheduled interviews that occur in Brisbane offices between October and April are certainly not helping turn around our state’s economic fortunes.
I often ask lifelong Queenslanders why on earth we haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and embraced daylight saving. Oddly the only answers I seem to get are confused responses about cranky cows and fading curtains.
As our population concentrates in the south east corner of the state, those antiquated excuses can no longer stand.
We need to get over this notion that the farmers of the state would be ruined by Queenslanders turning their clocks forward once a year. Farmers in western NSW and Victoria appear very capable of coping, and Queensland farmers are somehow able to milk their cows in winter.
The reality is, those Queenslanders living up north and out west have no reason to need daylight saving the way those of us stuck in the far south east do — because they already get reprieve from the harsh morning sun.
In Brisbane, the sun rose this morning at 4.53am and by the end of the month that time will stretch out to 4.45am. Yet in Townsville, the sun didn’t rise until 5:30am this morning, and those in Mt Isa enjoyed a very civilised sunrise at 5.57am — almost exactly the same time as the sun rose in Sydney.
Ultimately, I think it’s selfish that those Queenslanders in the north and west of the state, who are spared the discomfort of sunrises before 5am, force the rest of us to suffer through this indignity each and every year.
Surely it is time to have a debate about introducing daylight saving again.