In 1970, the Parliament of Australia passed the Metric Conversion Act, which created the Metric Conversion Board to facilitate the conversion of measurements from imperial to metric. A timeline of major developments in this conversion process is as follows:
1971 – the Australian wool industry converted to the metric system.
1972 – all primary schools were teaching the metric system alone. Many had been teaching both imperial and metric and later, metric alone since Australia changed to the decimal currency system in 1966. Horse racing converted in August 1972 and air temperatures were converted in September 1972.
1973 – all secondary schools were now using the metric system.
1974 – large scale conversion across industries, including packaged grains, dairy products, eggs, building, timber, paper, printing, meteorological services, postal services, communications, road transport, travel, textiles, gas, electricity, surveying, sport, water supply, mining, metallurgy, chemicals, petroleum and automotive services. Most beverages, aside from spirits, also converted to metric units by the end of 1974. The conversion of road signs took place in July 1974. There was a publicity campaign to prepare the public.
1977 – all packaged goods were labelled in metric units, and the air transport, food, energy, machine tool, electronic, electrical engineering and appliance manufacturing industries converted.
1987 – The Real estate industry converted to metric.
1988 – Metrication completed, with the metric system becoming the only system of legal measurements in Australia.
Can anyone one tell me why an Aussie forum uses imperial? I am 50, born in Australia and educated using metric but I notice a lot (most) people on this forum use imperial measurements. Personally, I find imperial hard to use and I guess that most of the younger ones on this forum would be the same.
Is there any particular reason why you use imperial?