The concept was first introduced as "the Never Never Land" in Barrie's West End theatre play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, first staged in 1904.

In the earliest drafts of the play, the island was called "Peter's Never Never Never Land", a name possibly influenced by the 'Never Never', a contemporary term for outback Australia.

In Barrie's original tale, the name for the real world is the Mainland, which suggests Neverland is a small island, reached by flight.

While flying is the only way to reach it, the film does not show exactly how Captain Hook manages to get from Neverland to London in order to kidnap Peter's children, Jack and Maggie.

In the 2011 miniseries Neverland, inspired by Barrie's works, the titular place is said to be another planet existing at the centre of the universe.

The novel Peter and Wendy mentions that in Neverland there are many more suns and moons than on the Mainland, making time difficult to track.

[citation needed] In Peter Pan in Scarlet (2006), by Geraldine McCaughrean, time freezes as soon as the children arrived in Neverland.

In J. M. Barrie's play and novel, most of the adventures in the stories take place in the Neverwood, where the Lost Boys hunt and fight the pirates and Native Americans.

At the end of the play, one year after the main events in the story, the house appears in different spots every night, but always on some tree-tops.

Trapped on Marooners' Rock in the lagoon just offshore, Peter faced impending death by drowning, as he could not swim or fly from it to safety.

In the many film, television, and video game adaptations of Peter Pan, adventures that originally take place in either the Mermaids' Lagoon, the Neverwood forest, or on the pirates' ship are played out in a greater number of more elaborate locations.

These locales include: In Steven Spielberg's 1991 film Hook, the pirates occupy a small port town peppered with merchant shopfronts, warehouses, hotels, pubs, and an improvised baseball field, and many ships and boats of varying sizes and kinds fill the harbour.

The Mermaids' Lagoon is directly connected to the Lost Boys' tree house structure by a giant clam-shell pulley system.

The roles and activities of the fairies are more elaborate in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906): they occupy kingdoms in the Gardens and at night "mischief children who are locked in after dark" to their deaths or entertain them before they return to their parents the following day;[clarification needed] and they guard the paths to a "Proto-Neverland" called the birds' island.

When dying from Hook's poison, Tinker Bell is saved when Peter and other children and adults across the Neverlands and Mainland call out "I do believe in fairies, I do, I do," so their deaths are not necessarily permanent.

In the novel and the play, between the flight from the Mainland (reality) and the Neverland, they are relatively simple animals which provide entertainment, instruction and some limited guidance to flyers.

The Lost Boys are a tribe of "children who fall out of their prams when the nurse is not looking;"[1]: [page needed]  having not been claimed by humans in seven days, they were collected by the fairies and flown to the Neverland.

They are a formidable fighting force despite their youth and they make war with the pirates, although they seem to enjoy a harmonious existence with the other inhabitants of Neverland.

The Piccaninny tribe are known to make ferocious and deadly war against Captain Hook and his pirates, but their connection with the Lost Boys is more lighthearted.

At first glance, Wendy is enchanted by their beauty, but finds them vain and irritating, as they would "splash her with their tails, not accidentally, but intentionally" when she attempted to steal a closer look.

Barrie describes the mermaids' "haunting" transformation at the "turn of the moon" while "uttering strange wailing cries" at night as the lagoon becomes a very "dangerous place for mortals".

Animals (referred to as beasts) live throughout Neverland, such as bears, tigers, lions, wolves, flamingoes and crocodiles.

Like all the agencies of the Neverland, the animals do not need to eat, nor are they eaten when killed, nor do they reproduce (as they enjoy the same immortality as all other inhabitants), so their presence is a paradox.

Other inhabitants of Neverland are suggested by Barrie in his original novel, such as a "small old lady with a hooked nose", "gnomes who are mostly tailors", and princes "with six elder brothers" – reminiscent of European fairy tales.