Eucla, Australia · UTC+8:45 ☆

Eucla is a tiny settlement on the Nullarbor Plain, at the Western Australia-South Australia border, with a population of fewer than 100 people. It uses Australia/Eucla, UTC+8:45 year-round, one of only a handful of places in the world with a 45-minute offset from UTC. No daylight saving is observed.

UTC+8:45 and the Nullarbor’s edge

The offset exists because Eucla sits at a geographic boundary where neither Western Australia’s UTC+8 nor South Australia’s UTC+9:30 is a natural fit. The community informally adopted UTC+8:45 to compromise between the two states’ times. The IANA database formalized this local convention, giving a tiny outpost one of the most unusual timezone entries in the entire database.

Eucla’s population is small enough that “community standards” means a few dozen people at the roadhouse and motel that serve Nullarbor crossing traffic on the Eyre Highway. The timezone is real but applies to almost no one. The vast Nullarbor stretches for hundreds of kilometers in both directions: no trees, little water, extraordinary flatness. At the edge of a dead sea that dried up 14 million years ago, the sun rises at a time that no standard offset would predict.

Convert 9am Eucla time to London

Sources

• IANA Time Zone Database
• Bureau of Meteorology, Australia
• Atlas of Living Australia, Eucla region