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It is to be expected that a fictitious community like Coal Flat should be based on a real place, and Coasters will have no difficulty in recognizing the geographical location and physical lay-out of the Flat. A few historic characters and newspapers are mentioned by name. Apart from this, however, all characters in this novel are fictitious and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is coincidental.

There was in fact a beer boycott in 1947, but it began just after the time at which this novel ends. One or two incidents of that boycott have been used in the novel, but the novel does not attempt any reconstruction of the actual boycott.

At the back of the novel there is a list of explanations of such expressions and references as may be unfamiliar to some readers.

In Maori words not already borrowed into New Zealand English I have followed the increasing practice of spelling long vowels double, to give a better idea of how they should be pronounced.