The difference in Wendt’s approach to the significance of the New Zealand landscape has already been pointed out, but a closer analysis is required for a clear understanding of the implications. In Sons for the Return Home, the mother’s perception of New Zealand as a degraded, unpleasant place to live and her contrasting opinion of Samoa initially work to distance her son from his new surroundings. "Samoa is lush green with tropical forests," she says, while "New Zealand is made up of over-crowded cities rife with crime, especially murder" (74). When he returns to Samoa, however, he sees that place as degraded, and the influence of his mother's opinions is weakened. Instead, he becomes comfortable in his New Zealand surroundings, a process influenced by his observations of his girlfriend. "As he watched how sure she was in the bush, which was completely strange to him, he felt a deeper need to know her and through her his country of exile" (81). This is only part of the protagonist's growth, however;  in the moment when his girlfriend kills a hawk, it becomes apparent to him that his spiritual understanding of the land is greater than hers.

            This incident with the hawk is also symbolic of a divide that is present in all three of Wendt’s novels: land is either developed and unwelcoming, like the "insatiable roots stabbed into the earth... breathing its poisons into the sky" in the city (Sons for the Return Home 83), or wild and full of hidden depths, like the place "of burning sky and earth and sea and the eternal humming silence that weaves all things together" (Ola 93). Characters in each novel--the girlfriend in Sons for the Return Home, Gill’s husband in Ola, and the Tribunal in Black Rainbow--are linked to the developed, unwelcoming aspects of the land. Either colonisers or the descendants of colonisers, they are depicted as lacking the spirituality necessary for an empathetic relationship with the land.

            It is through a spiritual understanding of the land that Wendt’s characters claim a right to inhabit it. In Ola and Black Rainbow, Maori claims to the land are freely admitted, and Pakeha are characterised as lacking the innate spiritual links that might qualify them for the role of land caretakers: "They’re newcomers; they’re not rooted in Aotearoa" (Ola 72). However, people from the Pacific Islands do not appear to be considered "newcomers". Indeed, in Black Rainbow the distinction between Maori and Pacific Islander has all but disappeared, and they are all Tangata Moni, "merged with our sisters and brothers from the Islands... [to become]the Tangata Moni, the True People" (158).

            The various works here discussed differ not only in their representative of lands, but also in their approaches to traditional culture. While Kightley’s plays focus on the lives of the characters who are faced with problems arising from the transplantation of certain cultural practices into a new land, they also demonstrate not all members of a particular group will choose or need to choose to follow the same path. Underlying the plays is a common theme: that the solutions to an individual’s perceived problems can ultimately be provided only by that individual him/herself.

            For Sione’s musical group in Dawn Raids, the establishment of the band is one answer to the problems associated with establishing identity in a new land.  The manner in which Sione introduces his band, and the name change it is given, shows how particular events help facilitate this process. The name chosen for it, the "Noble Hawaiian Sabretooth Tigers", originally is an attempt to appeal to a broader culture; the growing racial problems triggered by dawn raids by police seeking illegal migrants prompts the band to rename themselves the  "Noble Samoan Sabretooth Tigers". It is a public assertion by the members that they are Samoan, even though Sione’s behavior in other ways suggests that there are elements in Samoan culture that he would like to ignore.