TURNING BACK THE CLOCK IN LAUNCESTON

LAUNCESTON’S 100-year-old town clock is not one you can set your watch by ... click here to read ths story online

The story goes that Launceston’s iconic town clock has been chiming at, and telling, the wrong time raising the likelihood that people relying upon it being late for appointments etc. 

However, is that all there is to this?

Apparently the clock has been telling us several minutes late, it looks like increasingly so as well, that a new hour is upon us.

Reportedly this is all due to “temperature changes which can affect the [clock’s] mechanism”. If that was all the time that is being lost in Launceston and it would be very reassuring to think that its only a matter of temperature.

Now these are “Westminster chimes", and they're quite loud, and they happen on the quarter hour, and only on the hour from 11pm to 6am and their wrongness is therefore not a good look.

General Manager Robert Dobryznski reports that the clock had been fixed and that everything was back to normal but he doesn’t tell us what that is.

He does say however that ‘‘it’s not uncommon with a more than 100-year-old mechanism for the clock to get off time, but when it’s wrong, it’s not wrong for long,’’ he said.

Now that is reassuring and it’s good to know that Town Hall is in charge of the Post Office clock and that we can rely upon it no matter what.

But wait, Mr. Dobryznski now tells us that ‘‘changes in temperature can affect the mechanism, either speeding it up or slowing it down [and that] we monitor it and make regular adjustments as necessary.”

But is Mr. Dobryznski telling us that Town Hall has both ‘Aging’ and  ‘Climate Change’ under  its control and that everything can be fixed by tweaking our ‘clock mechanisms’?

Actually it seems that what is being considered here, flagged possibly, hidden deep behind the clandestineness at Town Hall is that in order to really ‘fix things’ and the ‘clock’ is to shut down its ageing, temperature sensitive, Westminster chiming mechanism altogether, well just shut it up.

Given the clock’s unreliability, and people being more prone to being late, and tourists being woken at ungodly hours, Mr. Dobryznski may well be considering silencing the problem and fixing everything up all at once for all time.

The clock was installed above the Post Office in Launceston in 1909  but a debate has raged over the chimes ringing throughout the night in an area surrounded by tourist accommodation.

However, Mr. Dobryznski will surely have the answer at his fingertips and like he says if its "wrong, it’s not wrong for long.’’

As they sometimes say, when there is more to unfold “watch this space.”