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Did You Know?

Perth's Most Famous Fact Is Wrong by Twenty-Five Kilometres

Roughly 50,000 to 60,000 people in Western Australia do not commute to work by road. They fly.

FIFO — fly-in, fly-out — is the dominant employment model in WA mining. Workers board a plane in Perth, fly to a site in the Pilbara, the Goldfields or the Mid West, live in a camp beside the mine, work a fixed roster, then fly home. The state's Department of Mines has put FIFO at more than 60% of the mining workforce.

The most common roster is two weeks on, one week off. Fourteen consecutive days, usually of twelve-hour shifts, then seven days at home. Some sites run eight days on, six off.

Which means that for tens of thousands of Western Australians, the working week is not seven days long. It is twenty-one.

The model exists because the alternative was more expensive. In the 1970s and 80s, mining companies in the Pilbara faced a choice: build permanent towns with schools, hospitals and shops hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, or fly people in and out. Hamersley Iron and BHP began experimenting in the mid-1980s. By the 1990s it was standard.

The towns show the pattern. Wiluna had a population of 9,000 in 1938. It now has about 300 — its decline began when its gold mine closed in 1947, and the mine workers there today fly in rather than settle.

There is a cost that is well documented and worth stating plainly: research into WA rosters records extended wakefulness, truncated sleep, night-shift work and circadian misalignment as standard features of the arrangement, and the mental health of FIFO workers has been the subject of formal inquiry.

Perth is routinely called the most isolated major city on Earth. The claim was popularised by Bill Bryson and has stuck.

The numbers behind it are real. The nearest city with over 500,000 people is Adelaide, about 2,130 km away in a straight line — about 2,600 km by road, across the Nullarbor Plain, whose name is Latin for "no trees" and which contains Australia's longest straight stretch of road, 146 km without a bend. The drive takes at least two days. Perth is closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, by roughly 300 km.

Then you check it properly.

If the criterion is "distance to the nearest city of more than a million people," Perth is not the most remote city on Earth. Auckland, for one, is more remote: it sits 2,155 km from Sydney with no other million-person city in New Zealand.

That is only about 25 kilometres further than Perth-to-Adelaide.

Perth's defining characteristic, the thing every Perth resident will tell a visitor within an hour of arrival, is beaten by a margin roughly equal to the length of a modest commute — by a city that already has a page on this site.

The clock: which brings us to what Perth does with its isolation, which is refuse to move.

Western Australia has voted on daylight saving four separate times — in 1975, 1984, 1992 and 2009 — and rejected it every time. The 2009 vote followed a full three-year trial from 2006. The state tried it, lived with it, and voted it down again.

So while Sydney and Melbourne shift to UTC+11 each October, Perth stays on UTC+8 permanently, and the gap between Australia's east and west coasts widens from two hours to three for half the year.

Perth sits at about 116° east, on a zone built for 120°, which leaves its clock roughly seventeen minutes ahead of its own sun — one of the better-aligned cities in the country.

The most isolated major city in Australia has been asked four times whether it would like to be an hour closer to everyone else, and has said no four times.