Saving Time In The Sunshine State
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Saving Time In The Sunshine State |
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By Glenn Davies © 2008 When he was seven, Glenn made his own Time Machine from bits of string, pulleys
and corrugated iron found around his house in country Queensland. It didn't
work! As a teenager he read every science fiction book in his school library,
watched Star Wars and Star Trek over and over again, and could be found every
week night watching Dr Who. At university he immersed himself in the study of
history. At the end Glenn emerged as a high school history teacher with a PhD.
Dr Davies can now transcribe but not prescribe — a concept his students seem to
struggle with. He lives with his beautiful wife, two gorgeous children, a mildly
disdainful cat and a King Charles cavalier puppy who has recently agreed to
renounce the monarchy and embrace his republican family's ways.
It all began with the Daylight Saving fiasco in Queensland in 2016. The Queensland vote went against falling-in-line with the other eastern states, so the Federal Government intervened to force time consistency. In hindsight, it is absurd how Queensland police enforced Federal Legislation by inspecting clocks in government buildings to check for time compliance. But absurdity and impossibilities stand side-by-side in a world where live piranhas in glass handbags are the celebrity fashion accessory of choice. The crunch came in the summer of 2018. It became downright ugly when North Queenslanders, like my grandmother in Charters Towers, were busted for time cheating. My Gran. So many clocks in her house. Gran loved clocks — clocks with chimes, clocks that dinged and donged on the hour and half-hour, a cuckoo clock, and even one with a cat on its face that gave a sickening meow every quarter hour. But the most frustrating thing of all was that not one of these clocks kept the same time. In Gran's home, time was never accurate but it could always be heard. I guess she never had to be anywhere at a set time. Her life was very fluid. Days merged into each other. Week days, weekends — they all had a sameness. Not that Gran's life wasn't full and rich. But it wasn't constrained by the work-a-day weeks that bind most of us. "Gran Time" we called it. For her, time was never uniform, singular or predictable. It was relative. To what, we never knew. But when she was told all her clocks had to be set to the new 'Canberra Time' you could almost hear the cogs in her mind synchronise for the coming battle. Here's the nub. The feisty old girl not only refused to turn forward her clock the mandated hour, but also started saving daylight. I'd guess the sunshine hoarding was what alerted the Federal Time Marshal about Gran. It was all over the house. Drawers overflowing with it. Cupboards full. A spare room packed to the rafters with sunshine. Boxes of it stacked in the hallway and under the beds. And all her curtains faded from the inside. My Gran had compensated for what had been taken from her by Federal intervention with her own sunshine bank. Who knew, though, what could be the effect of so much banked sunshine? When the Time Marshal and the Queensland Police burst through Gran's front door one Sunday morning they were first hit by a blinding burst of sunshine, then an overpowering smell of food that had rotted well before its expiry date. And there, sitting on her favourite blue-patterned sofa, wearing huge welding glasses, was my now teenage Gran, her internal body clock reversed from so much living within her own sunshine state. My Gran, the time cheat, had just cheated time.
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