Talking about O'Dwyer

What really happened when Joe Panapa, a soldier in the Maori Battalion, was killed in action in the New Zealand campaign in Crete in the Second World War? And why did Joe s whanau place a makutu, a Maori curse, on Joe's Pakeha commanding officer, O'Dwyer, when he visited Joe s home marae after the war to pay his respects? Years later, Mike Newall, an New Zealand philosopher at Oxford University, uses the occasion of O'Dwyer s funeral to revisit the incident. Why did O'Dwyer kill the...
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What really happened when Joe Panapa, a soldier in the Maori Battalion, was killed in action in the New Zealand campaign in Crete in the Second World War? And why did Joe s whanau place a makutu, a Maori curse, on Joe's Pakeha commanding officer, O'Dwyer, when he visited Joe s home marae after the war to pay his respects? Years later, Mike Newall, an New Zealand philosopher at Oxford University, uses the occasion of O'Dwyer s funeral to revisit the incident. Why did O'Dwyer kill the Maori soldier during the retreat from Crete'. The precise facts of Panapa's death become the central thread of a complex novel which swings from an New Zealand boyhood to academic life at Oxford to a West Auckland Dalmatian connection which later takes Mike to Croatia at the height of the Serb-Croatian war. At the end of the novel the various threads come together in a military cemetery on a Crete hillside as Mike, and an Oxford friend, and Panapa's family both Maori and Croatian - visit the young soldier's grave.