automatic time zone conversion

Hi,

I'm trying to import some data into a table with a column
defined as "timestamp not null".  When I defined the table,
postgres seemed to automatically convert the column to
"timestamp with time zone not null", and I can't figure out how
to get rid of the time zone information.

I guess that's question one.

Question two is about how to import data so that time zones are
correct.  I'm importing a bunch of dates that occurred in
Sydney, Australia.  The dates are spread throughout the year, so
some will be in standard time and some in daylight time.  What's
the proper way to let postgres take care of this detail,
figuring out which ones are standard time and which are
daylight?  If I don't do this, it seems that all my summer dates
will be 1 hour off, or I'll have to manually figure out which
dates are in which section of the year.

Thanks.

  -Ken

p.s. - apologies if this is already answered somewhere.  I tried
to search the archive, but got this error:

"could not connect to server: Connection refused Is the server
running on host db.postgresql.org and accepting TCP/IP
connections on port 5433?"