In New South Wales (Australia) Daylight saving time starts on the first Sunday morning in October, which is a long weekend, with a Monday holiday. By then its light from about 6 AM, so if that’s when you got out of bed you’d be slipping back into early morning gloom for a month or so.
There is a definite boost in the amount of outdoor / recreational / kids sport / barbecue time it allows you at the end of the day.
Australia’s particular problem is that there are three main continental time zones, and not all states / territories in each time zone have adopted daylight saving (the ones which are partly in the Tropics, to @Schnitte’s point). That means we have multiple time zones [the middle one is half an hour offset, so you don’t even realign in DST to your neighbour’s time zone], and not all states start on the same day either.
You get all manner of arguments for the why. Those that recorded probably only represent a small portion. Eventually the reason daylight savings time is effected is because in higher latitudes people like it.
Possibly simply because once we ceased to be an agrarian society most people have a daily routine that starts with little more than rising, breakfasting, and beginning the working day. Even in times of single breadwinner families, and families wrangling children and school, the start of the day remains the short end. Leisure gets pushed to the end of the day. Probably lots of reasons for the why, but it seems near universal.
So aligning a day to push excess daylight about naturally puts it at the end of the day. At least for modern industrialised societies. Farmers still tend to dislike it.
Once your commercial sector runs at a given time span (9-5) it becomes hard to avoid the rest not becoming locked to the same schedule. People expect to be able to do business, shop, and synchronise with 9-5 family members. So the idea that you offset only part of working society won’t work.
Down here in Oz, in the higher latitudes (which means 35º for me) life is great with the switch. Suddenly I am no longer driving home in the dark. Evenings extend to let me do happy things. I don’t give a damn about the mornings, and only wish the time shift where greater so I could sleep longer without the sun rising.
Wikipedia sez that in the Southern Hemisphere, Chile, Paraguay, New Zealand, and (parts of) Australia observe DST. That appears to be the complete list. In all cases, they set their clocks forward in September or October, and set them back in March or April.
Until 2019 this was a favorite bit of trivia of mine. If my wife wanted to chat with family in Brazil she would have to pay close attention to the time changes.
The trick is that Brazil would “spring ahead” at the same time we would “fall behind”, thereby resulting in a 3 hour time difference from NY to Rio.
Then, in the US springtime, Brazil would “fall behind” and the US would “spring ahead” now resulting in a 1 hour time difference from NY to Rio.
Complicating things, the changes didn’t line up exactly so there was always a few weeks of 2 hour time difference.
Now that they did away with DST, the time difference from Rio to NY changes by 1 hour as US time changes. I wish we could stop DST here too!
In my years working in agriculture I came to realize that farmers who exclusively grew crops were fine with DST. Farmers who had livestock, or even just kept a few chickens, disliked it because animals don’t read clocks.
My dog has been wandering around this week whining, wondering why we’ve been waiting so long to feed him.
Because everyone else around them - employees, suppliers, customers - is not ignoring the change either. They have to build their schedules around those of the people they interact with.
They could and probably do until they can shift the animals’ schedule to the clock.
When DST was first instituted back in WWI, the farmers had the problem that, while the animals kept to their schedule, the trains that took milk into the city changed their running times. I don’t know if that continued to be a problem when trucks took over the shipping of milk, but I suspect it did.
I knew an Australian who went to school in England. On one of his first days there, the sun was coming in to eyes as he was trying to work at his desk. So he did what any Australian would do, move to his left. Fifteen minutes later the sun was in his eyes again! He finally figured it out.
I sympathize. I spend most of my time either hiking through backcountry, where it becomes instinctive to orient yourself approximately based on where the sun is, or doing wildlife photography, where you are always thinking about positioning yourself relative to a subject according to where the sun is in the sky. But much of my photography is in the southern hemisphere, and making the mental switch is hard for the first couple of weeks - it’s akin to making the switch to drive on the other side of the road.
Because the animals have their own diurnal rhythms. Cows, especially, need to be milked at pretty much the same time each day, no matter what the clock says. Roosters still crow at dawn, etc.
In the question, “ignore the change” surely meant ignore the fact that the nominal time has changed, and continue on the animals’ schedule. A farmer is not like a shopkeeper, who has to open when his customers think he will open based on what their watches say.
true for Chile, with about half a year having 4 hours difference with CET and the other half a year 6 hours … and a couple of weeks 5 hours (dates for changeover is not aligned to europe)
I live in the southern hemisphere and designed our passive-solar house … its maximized for max. sun harvest by a large (15 x 2 m) window opening to the NORTH
But a modern farmer does need to align the rest of their life with the nominal time. Kids need to go to school etc. By forcing them into two zones, the shift in time effectively stretches their working day and reduces leisure time. Which is the opposite of what the rest of us get out of the shift.
The whole thing is predicated on the fact that people are more willing to reset their clocks twice a year than to change their work / school / business hours twice a year. Which is fascinating, really.
Animals simply have no relationship with the clock to change; they work with the daylight they’ve got, of necessity.
Back in the 1960s my mother had a job across the close-by stateline in a state that had DST, while our state did not. That meant her work clock was different from our house clock. Her solution was to set our house clock to her work clock and let us kids suffer through the differences.
I’m not sure why you find that surprising. If all work / school / business hours are to change by the same amount, by far the simplest way to achieve that is to leave the nominal times the same and change the clocks. Which is why it’s done that way.