MIL-OSI Export

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephan Blum, Research Associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen

Imagine a city that thrived for thousands of years, its streets alive with workshops, markets and the laughter of children, yet that is remembered for a single night of fire. That city is Troy.

Long before Homer’s epics immortalised its fall, Troy was a place of everyday life. Potters shaped jars and bowls destined to travel far beyond the settlement itself, moving through wide horizons of exchange and connection.

Bronze tools rang in busy workshops. Traders called across the marketplace and children chased one another along sun‑warmed footpaths. This was the real heartbeat of Troy – the story history has forgotten.

Homer’s late eighth‑century BC epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, fixed powerful images in western cultural memory: heroes clashing, a wooden horse dragged through city gates, flames licking the night sky. Yet this dramatic ending hides a far longer, far more remarkable story: centuries of cooperation embedded in everyday social organisation. A story we might call the Trojan peace.

This selective memory is not unique to Troy. Across history, spectacular collapses dominate how we imagine the past: Rome burning in AD64, Carthage razed in 146BC and the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán falling in AD1521. Sudden catastrophe is vivid and memorable. The slow, fragile work of maintaining stability is easier to overlook.

The Trojan peace was not the absence of tension or inequality. It was the everyday ability to manage them without society breaking apart, the capacity to absorb pressure through routine cooperation rather than dramatic intervention.

When catastrophe outshines stability

Archaeology often speaks loudest when something goes catastrophically wrong. Fires preserve. Ruins cling to the soil like charcoal fingerprints. Peace, by contrast, leaves no single dramatic moment to anchor it.

Its traces survive in the ordinary: footpaths worn smooth by generations of feet; jars repaired, reused and handled for decades, some still bearing the drilled holes of ancient mending. These humble remnants form the true architecture of long‑term stability.

Troy is a textbook example. Archaeologists have identified nine major layers at the site, some of which are associated with substantial architectural reorganisation. But that isn’t evidence of destruction. Rather it simply reflects the everyday reality of a settlement’s history: building, use, maintenance or levelling, rebuilding and repetition.

Instead, I argue that Troy’s archaeological record reveals centuries of architectural continuity, stable coastal occupation and trade networks stretching from Mesopotamia to the Aegean and the Balkans – a geography of connection rather than conflict.

The only evidence for truly massive destruction that can be identified dates to around 2350BC. Against the broader archaeological backdrop, this stands out as a rare, fiery rupture – one dramatic episode within a much longer pattern of recovery and continuity.

Whether sparked by conflict, social unrest or an accident, it interrupted only briefly the long continuity of daily life – more than a thousand years before the events portrayed by the poet Homer in his tale of the Trojan war were supposed to have taken place.

Read more:
Fall of Troy: the legend and the facts

But what actually held Troy together for so long? During the third and second millennia BC, Troy was a modest but highly connected coastal hub, thriving through exchange, craft specialisation, shared material traditions and the steady movement of ideas and goods.

The real drivers of Troy’s development were households, traders and craftspeople. Their lives depended on coordination and reciprocity: managing water and farmland, organising production, securing vital resources such as bronze and negotiating movement along the coast. In modern terms, peace was work, negotiated daily, maintained collectively and never guaranteed.

When crises arose, the community adapted. Labour was reorganised, resources redistributed, routines adjusted. Stability was restored not through force, but through collective problem solving embedded in everyday practice.

This was not a utopia. Troy’s stability was constrained by environmental limits, population pressure and finite resources. A successful trading season could bring prosperity; a failed harvest could strain systems quickly. Peace was never about eliminating conflict, but about absorbing pressure without collapse.

Read more:
Troy’s fall was partly due to environmental strain – and it holds lessons for today

Archaeologically, this long-term balance appears as persistence: settlement layouts maintained across generations, skills refined and passed down, and gradual expansion from the citadel into what would later become the lower town. These developments depended on negotiation and cooperation, not conquest, revealing practical mechanisms of peace in the bronze age.

Why we remember the war

Stories favour rupture over routine. Homer’s Iliad was never a historical account of the bronze age, but a poetic reflection of heroism, morality, power and loss. The long, quiet centuries of cooperation before and after were too distant – and too subtle – to dramatise.

Modern archaeology has often followed the same gravitational pull. Excavations at Troy began with the explicit aim of locating the battlefield of the Trojan war. Even as scholarship moved on, the story of war continued to dominate the public imagination. War offers a clear narrative. Peace leaves behind complexity.

Reexamining Troy through the lens of peace shifts attention away from moments of destruction and towards centuries of continuity. Archaeology shows how communities without states, armies, or written law sustained stability through everyday practices of cooperation. What kept Troy going was not grand strategy, but the quiet work of living together, generation after generation.

The real miracle of Troy was not how it fell – but for how long it endured. Rethinking the cherished narrative of the Trojan war reminds us that lasting peace is built not in dramatic moments, but through the persistent, creative efforts of ordinary people.

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Stephan Blum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Rethinking Troy: how years of careful peace, not epic war, shaped this bronze age city – https://theconversation.com/rethinking-troy-how-years-of-careful-peace-not-epic-war-shaped-this-bronze-age-city-272833

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/01/30/rethinking-troy-how-years-of-careful-peace-not-epic-war-shaped-this-bronze-age-city-272833/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Williams, Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester

The age of humans is increasingly an age of sameness. Across the planet, distinctive plants and animals are disappearing, replaced by species that are lucky enough to thrive alongside humans and travel with us easily. Some scientists have a word for this reshuffling of life: the Homogenocene.

Evidence for it is found in the world’s museums. Storerooms are full of animals that no longer walk among us, pickled in spirit-filled jars: coiled snakes, bloated fish, frogs, birds. Each extinct species marks the removal of a particular evolutionary path from a particular place – and these absences are increasingly being filled by the same hardy, adaptable species, again and again.

One such absence is embodied by a small bird kept in a glass jar in London’s Natural History Museum: the Fijian Bar-winged rail, not seen in the wild since the 1970s. It seems to be sleeping, its eyes closed, its wings tucked in along its back, its beak resting against the glass.

A flightless bird, it was particularly vulnerable to predators introduced by humans, including mongooses brought to Fiji in the 1800s. Its disappearance was part of a broad pattern in which island species are vanishing and a narrower set of globally successful animals thrive in their place.

It’s a phenomenon that was called the Homogenocene even before a similar term growing in popularity, the Anthropocene, was coined in 2000. If the Anthropocene describes a planet transformed by humans, the Homogenocene is one ecological consequence: fewer places with their own distinctive life.

It goes well beyond charismatic birds and mammals. Freshwater fish, for instance, are becoming more “samey”, as the natural barriers that once kept populations separate – waterfalls, river catchments, temperature limits – are effectively blurred or erased by human activity. Think of common carp deliberately stocked in lakes for anglers, or catfish released from home aquariums that now thrive in rivers thousands of miles from their native habitat.

Meanwhile, many thousands of mollusc species have disappeared over the past 500 years, with snails living on islands also severely affected: many are simply eaten by non-native predatory snails. Some invasive snails have become highly successful and widely distributed, such as the giant African snail that is now found from the Hawaiian Islands to the Americas, or South American golden apple snails rampant through east and south-east Asia since their introduction in the 1980s.

Homogeneity is just one facet of the changes wrought on the Earth’s tapestry of life by humans, a process that started in the last ice age when hunting was likely key to the disappearance of the mammoth, giant sloth and other large mammals. It continued over around 11,700 years of the recent Holocene epoch – the period following the last ice age – as forests were felled and savannahs cleared for agriculture and the growth of farms and cities.

Over the past seven decades changes to life on Earth have intensified dramatically. This is the focus of a major new volume published by the Royal Society of London: The Biosphere in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene has reached the ocean

Life in the oceans was relatively little changed between the last ice age and recent history, even as humans increasingly affected life on land. No longer: a feature of the Anthropocene is the rapid extension of human impacts through the oceans.

This is partly due to simple over-exploitation, as human technology post-second world war enabled more efficient and deeper trawling, and fish stocks became seriously depleted.

Partly this is also due to the increasing effects of fossil-fuelled heat and oxygen depletion spreading through the oceans. Most visibly, this is now devastating coral reefs.

Out of sight, many animals are being displaced northwards and southwards out of the tropics to escape the heat; these conditions are also affecting spawning in fish, creating “bottlenecks” where life cycle development is limited by increasing heat or a lack of oxygen. The effects are reaching through into the deep oceans, where proposals for deep sea mining of minerals threaten to damage marine life that is barely known to science.

And as on land and in rivers, these changes are not just reducing life in the oceans – they’re redistributing species and blurring long-standing biological boundaries.

Local biodiversity, global sameness

Not all the changes to life made by humans are calamitous. In some places, incoming non-native species have blended seamlessly into existing environments to actually enhance local biodiversity.

In other contexts, both historical and contemporary, humans have been decisive in fostering wildlife, increasing the diversity of animals and plants in ecosystems by cutting or burning back the dominant vegetation and thereby allowing a greater range of animals and plants to flourish.

In our near-future world there are opportunities to support wildlife, for instance by changing patterns of agriculture to use less land to grow more food. With such freeing-up of space for nature, coupled with changes to farming and fishing that actively protect biodiversity, there is still a chance that we can avoid the worst predictions of a future biodiversity crash.

But this is by no means certain. Avoiding yet more rows of pickled corpses in museum jars will require a concerted effort to protect nature, one that must aim to help future generations of humans live in a biodiverse world.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Welcome to the ‘Homogenocene’: how humans are making the world’s wildlife dangerously samey – https://theconversation.com/welcome-to-the-homogenocene-how-humans-are-making-the-worlds-wildlife-dangerously-samey-274092

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/01/30/welcome-to-the-homogenocene-how-humans-are-making-the-worlds-wildlife-dangerously-samey-274092/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pan Wang, Associate Professor in Chinese and Asian Studies, UNSW Sydney

A Chinese personal safety app called Are You Dead? – recently rebranded as Demumu – has gone viral in recent weeks, attracting widespread media attention.

Behind its sudden popularity lie deeper social transformations, including demographic shifts and changing personal and family relationships. At the same time, demand is growing for trust-based, non-medical, easy-to-use care networks tailored to the rapid rise of one-person households.

Demumu also shows how digital technologies are not only responding to everyday safety concerns but also reshaping social and cultural norms. As traditional kinship ties and community support structures weaken, technology is stepping in to fill – and capitalise on – the gaps.

Demumu’s virality: from local to global

In mid-2025, with a development cost of around 1,500 yuan (US$210), three young Chinese professionals from Moonscape Technologies launched a personal safety app called Are You Dead?.

The app was designed to address the safety concerns of China’s growing population of people who live alone. As described on its official store page, the app aims to “protect every solitary moment with simple solutions and build a solid safety line for solo living”.

Users are prompted to click an on-screen button daily or fortnightly via their smartphone to verify they are alive. If a user fails to do so, the system automatically sends email alerts to two nominated emergency contacts.

Shortly after the app’s release, it went viral and quickly became the most downloaded paid app in China. A 10% stake in the company reportedly increased in value from 1 million yuan (US$140,000) to nearly 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million) within three days. This suggests an overall valuation of close to 100 million yuan (US$14 million) for the developer.

In mid-January 2026, the app rebranded as Demumu as part of a global expansion. It has now gained traction in more than 40 countries and ranking near the top in global markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

China is moving towards smaller families and more individualised lives

The 2020 China Population Census showed there were more than 125 million one-person households in China. That’s one in every four households in the country.

Around two thirds of these solo dwellers are aged between 20 and 59. It is estimated there will be 200 million such households by 2030.

The rapid rise of solo living in China can be attributed to several factors. First, a growing number of “empty nest” older adults. This has been caused by population ageing, and the decline of marriage and fertility while divorce rates rise. These trends have been intensified by longer life expectancy and the legacy of the decades-long One Child Policy.

Second, intimate relationships and family formation have become less attainable for many. Men are often expected to own a home and a car even at the courtship stage, which is increasingly difficult due to rising living costs and high property prices. “Bride prices” – paid by a man’s family to a woman’s before marriage – are also escalating.

Third, large-scale migration from rural to urban areas and between cities has produced many “split households”. Millions of “empty-nest youths” live alone for extended periods under intense work-related pressures before forming or reuniting with families. A common anxiety among this group is “disappearing in loneliness”.

Numerous reports have documented “empty nesters” who died and were only found days, weeks, or even months later, particularly in gated urban communities. These incidents highlight the vulnerabilities associated with solo living, as well as the absence of trust-based safety networks. This is a problem Demumu seeks to address.

Moreover, among younger generations in China – particularly highly educated urban women – attitudes towards marriage and singlehood are shifting. Living alone is increasingly a deliberate choice.

Career development and personal autonomy are becoming higher priorities. Many women wish to avoid taking on a disproportionate share of domestic and caregiving responsibilities.

Solo living: a high-potential market

China’s singles economy is booming, and the market still has significant room to grow.

In major metropolitan centres such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, products and services tailored to people living alone are more and more visible.

These include one-person hotpot restaurants, single-person karaoke booths, and micro-apartments designed for solo dwellers. Compact household appliances such as mini-fridges, coffee machines, and kettles are also readily available, as well as solo travel packages offered by tourism agencies.

Companionship of various kinds is also on offer. Owning pets – particularly dogs and cats – often plays an important role in the everyday lives of people who live alone.

The intimate services market has also expanded rapidly through digital platforms and smartphone apps. This includes love mentoring and relationship counselling, online dating and digital romance games. AI-powered chatbot companions and humanoid dolls designed to meet the emotional and relational needs of solo dwellers are also becoming more common.

There’s also an emerging niche business known as date-renting. This practice was initially popularised among young “bare branches” seeking to bring a temporary partner home for Lunar New Year family gatherings.

However, date-renting has since evolved into a personalised service economy in which individuals exchange intimacy, companionship, and dating experiences. In the process, dating is transformed into an “emotional commodity,” made visible for public consumption and increasingly shaped by platform profiteering.

Together with the emergence of safety apps such as Demumu, these singles-oriented businesses and technologies are energising China’s solo-driven economy. More importantly, they are also filling the gaps left by shrinking families and increasingly individualised living arrangements. In the process, they are reshaping contemporary social and personal relations and normalising single-centred cultures and lifestyles in everyday life.

Pan Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Are You Dead? China’s viral app reveals a complex reality of solo living and changing social ties – https://theconversation.com/are-you-dead-chinas-viral-app-reveals-a-complex-reality-of-solo-living-and-changing-social-ties-274536

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/01/30/are-you-dead-chinas-viral-app-reveals-a-complex-reality-of-solo-living-and-changing-social-ties-274536/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By A/Prof. Elmira Jamei, Associate professor, Victoria University

This week, Victoria recorded its hottest day in nearly six years. On Tuesday, the northwest towns of Walpeup and Hopetoun reached 48.9°C, and the temperature in parts of Melbourne soared over 45°C. Towns in South Australia also broke heat records.

This heatwave is not an outlier. It is a warning shot.

These weather conditions rival the extreme heat seen in the lead-up to the 2019–20 Black Summer, and they point to a future in which days like this are no longer rare, but routine.

What makes this summer so confronting is not just how hot it has been, but this: Australia already knows how to cool cities, yet we are failing to do it. Why?

Urban heat is not inevitable

Cities heat up faster and stay hotter than surrounding areas because of how they are built. Dense development, dark road surfaces, limited shade, and buildings that trap heat and rely heavily on air-conditioning create the “urban heat island” effect.

This means cities absorb vast amounts of heat during the day and release it slowly at night, preventing the city from cooling down even after sunset. During heatwaves, this trapped heat accumulates day after day and pushes temperatures well beyond what people can safely tolerate.

Future urbanisation is expected to amplify projected urban heat, irrespective of background climate conditions. Global climate change is making the urban heat island effect worse, but much of the heat we experience in cities has been built in through decades of planning and design choices.

Heat is a health and equity crisis

Heatwaves already kill more than 1,100 Australians each year, more than any other natural hazard. Extreme heat increases the risk of heart and respiratory disease, worsens chronic illness, disrupts sleep and overwhelms health services.

Poorly designed and inadequately insulated homes, particularly in rental and social housing can become heat traps. People on low incomes are least able to afford effective cooling, pushing many into energy debt or forcing them to endure dangerously high temperatures.
Urban heat deepens existing inequalities. Those who contributed least to the problem often bear the greatest burden.

Australia has expertise, but not ambition

Here is the paradox. Australia is a major contributor to global research on urban heat. Australian researchers are developing national tools to measure and mitigate urban heat, and studies from cities such as Melbourne have quantified urban heat island intensity and investigated how urban design can influence heat stress.

Additionally, Australia already has the technologies to cool cities, from reflective coatings and heat-resilient pavements to advanced shading systems. Yet many of our cities remain dangerously hot. The issue isn’t a lack of solutions, but the failure to roll them out at scale.

Internationally, we are lagging behind countries where large-scale heat mitigation projects are already reducing urban temperatures, cutting energy demand and saving lives.

For example, Paris has adopted a city-wide strategy to create “cool islands”, transforming public spaces and schoolyards into shaded, cooler places that reduce heat stress during heatwaves.

In China, the Sponge City program, now implemented in cities such as Shenzhen and Wuhan, uses green infrastructure and water-sensitive design to cool urban areas and reduce heat stress.

Symbolic change can’t meet the challenge

Too often, urban heat policy stops at small, symbolic actions, a pocket park here, a tree-planting program there. These measures are important, but they are not sufficient for the scale of the challenge.

Greening cities is essential. Trees cool streets, improve thermal comfort and deliver multiple health and environmental benefits. But greenery has limits. If buildings remain poorly insulated, roads continue to absorb heat and cooling demand keeps rising, trees alone will not protect cities from extreme temperatures in the coming decades.

Urban heat is a complex systems problem. It emerges from how cities are built, and is largely shaped by construction materials, building codes, transport systems and planning decisions locked in over generations. Scientists know a great deal about how to reduce urban heat, but many responses remain piecemeal and intuitive rather than systemic.

Designing an uncomfortable future

Research suggests that even if global warming is limited to below 2°C, heatwaves in major Australian cities could approach 50°C by 2040. At those temperatures, emergency responses alone will not be enough. Beyond certain temperature thresholds, behaviour change, public warnings and cooling centres cannot fully protect people.

The choices we make now about buildings, streets, materials and energy systems will determine whether Australian cities become increasingly unliveable, or remain places where people can safely live, work and age.

The battle against urban heat will be won or lost through design, technology, innovation and political will. Cities need to deploy advanced cool materials across roofs, buildings and roads, in combination with nature-based solutions. This will only work if governments use incentives to reward heat-safe design. Heat must be planned for systematically, not treated as a cosmetic problem.

With leadership and a handful of well-designed, large-scale projects, Australia could shift from laggard to leader. We have the science. We have the industry. We have the solutions. The heat is here. The only real question is whether we act, or keep absorbing it.

A/Prof. Elmira Jamei does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. We know how to cool our cities and towns. So why aren’t we doing it? – https://theconversation.com/we-know-how-to-cool-our-cities-and-towns-so-why-arent-we-doing-it-273341

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/01/30/we-know-how-to-cool-our-cities-and-towns-so-why-arent-we-doing-it-273341/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Allison Creed, Lecturer and Curriculum Designer, Cognitive Linguistics, The University of Melbourne

I recently watched a participant at a wine tasting freeze when asked for their opinion. “It’s … nice?” they ventured, clearly wanting to say more but lacking the specific vocabulary to do so.

The sommelier quickly intervened, noting the wine was “quite elegant, with beautiful structure.” The participant simply nodded, and the conversation ended.

Wine is a multi-billion-dollar export commodity, yet industry “winespeak” can actually stop people feeling they can join in conversations about wine. And often words can get lost in translation – or mean something very different – in fast-growing wine markets such as China, Vietnam and Thailand.

My new research systematically reviewed 77 studies on wine language and metaphor. Building on my earlier research tracking how wine metaphors evolve, it reveals a surprising disconnect: the language used to taste and talk about wine does not travel across cultures as smoothly as the industry assumes.

This matters for the wine industry, because wine descriptions directly influence purchasing decisions and overall enjoyment.

Images in English that don’t travel

The problem is not the use of metaphor itself. In their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue metaphors are essential cognitive tools we use every day, often without even noticing.

When we say a wine has “body” or “backbone,” we draw on our intimate knowledge of physical experience to make sense of taste and texture. This is how human language works.

The problem is when metaphors fail to travel. Consider “body,” a fundamental concept in English-speaking wine cultures when talking about weight and mouthfeel.

Research shows even native English speakers interpret “body” differently. Some believe it refers to flavour, others to texture, still others to alcohol content.

When translated where the word lacks the same associations, confusion multiplies. In Dutch, German, and Hungarian, literal translations (“lichaam”, “Körper”, “test”) trigger awkward anatomical associations. What sounds natural in English reads as bizarre in translation.

The enigma of ‘elegance’

“Elegance” presents a similar challenge. Wine experts across cultures share a core understanding – that a wine is smooth, balanced, refined, or complex. Yet cultural associations can vary.

In Chinese wine reviews, elegance is expressed through mírén (迷人), meaning “charming”, and nèiliǎn (內斂), meaning “introverted”. These are social-aesthetic metaphors that activate entirely different cultural scripts.

This is significant, because wine is what’s called an “experience good”. You cannot judge taste or quality until after you purchase. Consumers rely on descriptions to signal what they are buying.

When metaphors don’t align culturally, the industry is not just failing to communicate but actively eroding people’s trust.

Why some words affect wine ratings

The wine world’s most widespread linguistic habit is anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics.

Industry reviews routinely characterise wines as “shy,” “honest,” or “aggressive”. This is not decorative language; it is cognitive scaffolding.

Describing wine as a person helps us communicate complex sensory perceptions by drawing on our personal experience of human behaviour and emotion.

However, these particular metaphors can carry cultural baggage. Research suggests that wines labelled with feminine terms (such as “delicate” or “elegant”) are perceived as hedonistic products meant for quick consumption, leading consumers to believe they decline at a younger age.

Conversely, wines with masculine descriptors (“powerful”, “bold”) are linked to ageing potential, and receive higher quality ratings.

Although these gendered metaphors might not always hit the price tag directly, they can fundamentally alter if and when a consumer decides to drink the bottle.

Creating better metaphors

As global wine trade increases, industry is eager to connect with new consumers in emerging markets. Yet they often do so using vocabulary rooted in European traditions and Western thinking that do not communicate clearly to international audiences.

Wine marketers find themselves caught between traditional wine language maintaining prestige and authority, and pressure to create new metaphors resonating globally.

The solution is not to stop using metaphors to describe wine – that would be impossible. The question is how metaphors can work inclusively across cultures, rather than carrying cultural baggage that can lead to bias and market undervaluation.

My research suggests a need to rethink how we communicate about wine. This could include writing tasting notes that incorporate more universally understood sensory cues and culturally consistent evaluative language, in addition to traditional expert vocabulary.

Without deliberate attention to how metaphors travel, or fail to travel, across cultures, the gap between expert “winespeak” and consumer understanding will only widen. The industry is not building a Tower of Babel through metaphor itself, but through the assumption that everyone speaks the same metaphorical language.

Allison Creed is affiliated with The University of Melbourne, Wine Communicators of Australia, and the Global Wine Business Institute.

– ref. ‘Bold’. ‘Elegant’. ‘Introverted’? How words describing wine get lost in translation – https://theconversation.com/bold-elegant-introverted-how-words-describing-wine-get-lost-in-translation-274415

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/01/30/bold-elegant-introverted-how-words-describing-wine-get-lost-in-translation-274415/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phoebe Hart, Associate Professor, Film Screen & Animation, Queensland University of Technology

Raise a paw if your dog ever helped you to meet a new two-legged friend? The premise of ABC’s Dog Park capitalises on the fact pet ownership in Australia is increasing, with canines being the most popular choice.

This rise is sadly commensurate to the rate of social isolation and loneliness experienced in Australia, especially among men.

Enter Roland, played by Dog Park co-creator Leon Ford. Ford, who (according to the press notes on the series) says his own dog makes him nervous, came up with the concept with Matchbox Productions’ Amanda Higgs, best known for spawning the Australian drama series The Secret Life of Us (2001–05).

Roland is a middle aged recluse and all-round grump who has a hard time trusting and/or liking other humans. His sense of dissolution takes a further dip when his estranging wife Emma (Brooke Satchwell) departs for work in the United States, leaving the TAFE career counsellor in charge of his distant teenage daughter Mia (Florence Gladwin) and disdained dog Beattie.

The first turning point of this six-part series occurs when Beattie goes missing and boozehound Roland searches for her at the local park. This is where Roland meets the always sunny Samantha (Celia Pacquola) and a ragtag bunch of overly friendly folks and their fur babies (AKA the Dog Park Divas), all of whom are quite familiar with Beattie already.

From the outset, you can tell it is this diverse pack of dog lovers that are most likely to draw Roland out of his hard, turtle-like shell, and hopefully deliver a few laughs along the way too.

The ensemble cast features a few familiar faces, including Florence Gladwin, Nick Boshier, Ash Flanders, Ras-Samuel, Grace Chow and Elizabeth Alexander.

The series also features a quirky visual style throughout thanks to the off-beat camerawork from director of photography Aaron Farrugia and his team. The rambling and percussive musical score by Bryony Marks is another highlight with some solid licensed music choices as well. I love the title track use of the 1991 indie anthem Don’t Go Now by Aussie rockers Ratcat, but maybe Reg Mombassa and Peter O’Doherty’s Dog Trumpet would be more appropriate?

Doling out life lessons

Dog parks are a relatively novel innovation in town planning. There are many proven benefits to exercising dogs communally, but not unsurprisingly dog parks can also be sites of conflict.

Therefore, I would argue they are an unexploited arena for a television dramedy, although Wilfred (2007–10) sticks out like you-know-whats as a rather surreal and anthropomorphic example of dogs teaching humans a thing or two.

Both Dog Park and Wilfred centre on a hero suffering depression: a tough sell for prime time telly. I struggled to form an attachment to Dog Park’s protagonist, a man who goes out of his way to alienate others and does not seem to know how nor want to help himself, but feel this is a topic worth exploring.

The Dog Park Divas dole out life lessons, trying to help slow Roland’s downhill roll. Their interventions slowly begin to take effect – which gives hope that all humans are ultimately redeemable.

There is another bone to pick. Although much of the action in Dog Park, which was filmed in Melbourne, occurs in a city park, it appeared to me this location doesn’t look too fenced off. These outdoor areas are a hit in many urban centres and city councils around the world because dogs can be safely let off their leashes while the people socialise. Dog Park breaks slightly with reality in that way, but I guess the other 50% of the audience who don’t own a dog would never know.

All this said, Dog Park is tender in a darkly bittersweet way with an underlying thematic of connection and chosen family. The tone of grounded humour with a generous dollop of pathos aligns well with episode one director Matthew Seville’s previous work, which includes the painfully honest Please Like Me (2013–16).

Dog Park continues in this mode and could be a bit hit as well; I predict a TV format adaptation overseas in the not too distant future. An American remake of Wilfred starring Elijah Wood lasted four seasons.

Newcomer director Nina Buxton, fresh from directing episodes of season three of Heartbreak High (2022–), sinks her teeth into three episodes of Dog Park. There is peppery dialogue throughout thanks to screenwriters Penelope Chai, Chloe Wong and Nick Coyle alongside Ford and Higgs. Beattie (played by an unspecified poodle breed named Indie in real life) is pretty cute – and proof dogs really are the superior species.

Dog Park is on ABC and ABC iView from Sunday.

Phoebe Hart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Dog parks are an unexploited arena for a television dramedy – so now we have ABC’s Dog Park – https://theconversation.com/dog-parks-are-an-unexploited-arena-for-a-television-dramedy-so-now-we-have-abcs-dog-park-273458

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/01/30/dog-parks-are-an-unexploited-arena-for-a-television-dramedy-so-now-we-have-abcs-dog-park-273458/