Notes

Inspired, as was the original, by Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood, Whanau II assembles a cast of characters in the rural Maori community of Waituhi: Rongo Mahana, alone in a landscape altered by Pakeha values; Miro Mananui fighting to retain her land; Andrew Whatu, who must leave the village to
follow his ambitions; Mattie Jones, who came back to the village defeated by the city; and Nanny Paora, who escapes the present by living in the past. Ihimaera reveals the tensions between traditional and modern, rural and urban that lie within modern Maori society.