The date is in US format, despite the system being in AU format, e.g.
In AU (and most of the world) we use DD MMM YYYY or variations of. Not MMM DD YYYY.
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When you set the AU locale setting, did you apply system-wide? There is also a login language setting. Make sure you have changed the locale for that to and remove US locale.
I set it during the installation. I checked locale just now:
me@VM-Zorin-2:~$ locale
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
Did you also check login locale? Get the Unofficial manual I wrote for Zorin 17.
This is one of my biggest problems with gnome and one of the points I listed in this forum when giving up on Zorin as my personal daily driver: customisation is heavily discouraged by the gnome devs.
I prefer the ISO-like YYYY-MM-DD format but gnome makes it impossible to customise date and time formats, or any other sort of display format, without changing basically your entire system locale to some other country. Even then it's not consistent: the clock in the taskbar for the Windows-like theme might change, but maybe not in the more gnome-like topbar or in the file explorer; and meanwhile a bunch of other things changed to match the new locale that you might not like, such as using . instead of , for the thousands separator.
In Windows and KDE Plasma, you can just change the date format, and that's it. At least for system elements, obviously 3rd party software might behave differently, but the taskbar and file explorer and all other core aspects of the OS respect it.
I tried gnome tweaks and several extensions recommended to me, or that I found mentioned around the Internet, but none of it solved the problem.
Fundamentally, the gnome devs despise user-customisation. The vanilla gnome DE experience is so locked down against the user, and has a bunch of defaults that are downright anti-user IMO, that it's almost at the point I'd rather use Mac OS than vanilla gnome. On my desktop I use KDE Plasma but unfortunately I am using gnome (with many tweaks and extensions) on my tablet because it does have some of the best support for touch and trackpad gestures.
You might prefer Zorin Lite, which does not use gnome - though I haven't checked it out for date format customisation, so I'm not 100% if that would work how you want, but it uses the Xfce desktop environment which actually allows users to customise things instead of assuming we're all idiot babies that should barely be allowed to use our own computers. It's not "lite" in the sense it's stripped back and less powerful, just in the sense that Xfce is a lot less resource-hungry than gnome so it tends to run better on lower-powered hardware.
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Nice manual. Bookmarked.
I was a bit confused initially. On pg.170, it talks about input locale - not login locale.
I didn't know this, but it seems that the AU keyboard layout is the same as the US keyboard - I've always chosen US keyboard because for about 30 years that's all i knew. My first non-Amiga was US layout.
I looked around, this is a useful forum post which talks about it a bit: How does the 'Australian' keyboard layout differ to US? - Ask Ubuntu
Good thing i don't type in Dvorak any more (though i would like to return to it if i could get qwerty modifiers to work).
Keyboard input should not equal 'display date like America'. Yet apparently in Gnome it does! Quite bizarre imo and extremely confusing:
"my date displays funny" ... "change your keyboard layout". 
Thanks for the tip.
Isn't Lite discontinued? I've already invested so much into Core for my parents, and the solution to change to the AU keyboard will be fine for them.
But i get your frustration. I see Zorin, and i love the ease. But my god it's Gnome DE is limiting. I use Plasma myself too, Zorin is for my parents and my seldom-used laptop.
I'm kinda hoping Cosmic proves to be a hybrid of Plasma's capability, with Gnome's appealing and clean interface.
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Lite is scheduled to be discontinued in 2029, but is still being actively developed and maintained through Zorin versions 17 and 18; it is currently planned to not release a Lite version for Zorin 19.
I still recommend Zorin Core to people looking to leave Windows as, for the average non-techie user, it's a very nice OS mixing Ubuntu's popularity with a (mostly) sane desktop experience. Like you, I also gave my parents Zorin on their machines, Core on mum's laptop and Lite on my stepdad's much older Dell 2-in-1. They don't care about things like date formats or customisation, they barely do more than basic web browsing, so no complaints from them whether it's gnome or not 
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Lite is being dropped by Zorin in 2029. Yes it is no surprise that M$ employees voted for Gnome to receive $10,000 from their 'charity' fund for alternative OS development. Perhaps in due course the Gnome Devs will join systemd and pulse audio creator Herr Poettinger at Microsoft.
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Hopefully they'll rake in some insane $ and then leave Microsoft. I hope they're being overpaid.
God i hate Microsoft.
It very easily allows this. Right click > Properties > Custom format.
When I switched from Windows OS to GnuLinux on Zorin Core, I only felt like I was learning a new OS. I did not feel like I left Microsoft until I switched to Zorin OS Lite and finally had user control back.
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