1 February 1895   Change to standard time

At midnight on Sunday, 1 February 1895, all clocks in Australia were altered to bring Australian colonies in line with international standard times. This system meant that there were standard hourly time zones for eastern, central and western Australia. Prior to this change the colonies had followed their own times based upon the times their capital cities set at the local observatory. In the new system eastern time was set by the 150th meridian, South Australia by the 135th meridian, and Western Australia by the 120th meridian, east of Greenwich.

In England Greenwich Mean Time had been adopted as standard time by the railways from the 1840s. The United States adopted Greenwich Mean Time as the international standard in 1883, but Europe was much slower in accepting this system. In Australia, Sir Charles Todd, South Australian Postmaster-General and Superintendent of Telegraphs, and builder of the Overland Telegraph, was a strong advocate of the change. In order to synchronise the change in all the colonies, each colony had to pass the Standard of Time Bill in its own parliament. In Adelaide the clocks were stopped for fourteen minutes and twenty seconds to bring them to the corrected time.

Graeme Davidson, 'Standard Time', in Australian Historical Studies, Volume 25 No 99, October 1992, pp. 169-171.