Blending vaudeville, musical theatre, circus, Cantonese Opera and martial arts, Slow Boat is a play within a play, inspired by the unexpected arrival in Australia of playwright Anna Yen’s father, along with 580 other Chinese men, during World War II.

Celebrations for victory in the Pacific at the end of World War II are the backdrop to Slow Boat, but instead of the usual vignettes Anna Yen has woven a story of six Chinese workers staging a theatre show at Brisbane Bulimba dockyards.

It’s a little known or understood chapter of Brisbane’s history that sadly, as Anna Yen told InQueensland, she could only discover after her father died.

“Men of that generation, not just Chinese heritage men, but I think men who went through the World War Two, I’ve heard lots of stories saying, `No, their dads or granddads didn’t actually speak much about it – they came home and just shut up about the hard times’,” Yen said.

“My father didn’t say much about it at all. I knew he’d been in Brisbane post World War Two, and all he said about that was, “I didn’t have two bob to rub together.” That’s all he said.”

Yen worked tirelessly to piece together his story, and also the broader history of around 800 Chinese men who lived in barracks at the Chinese Camp, known as Camp “A”, near Apollo Road at Bulimba. They built landing barges for the Americans who lived in nearby Camp Bulimba.

Anna grew up in Bondi Junction in Sydney. Her father was always vague about his past when she was growing up – she never knew the story of how he’d found his way to Australia. She didn’t even know he was a refugee.

“When they were building boats, they also had concerts. I had the great fortune to meet a woman whose family lived right next door to the Chinese town at Bulimba,” she said.

“Her family befriended many of the men, these wartime refugees, and she was invited next door to the concerts that the Chinese workers had for each other.

“I did ask her one time, `What were the concerts about?’ And she said, `I don’t know, I was too busy flirting.’

“It’s incredible. Who knew, right? Who knew. Well, some people knew, but not that many.”

The Bulimba Historical Association was crucial in helping Yen pull together the fuller picture of this slice of Brisbane history, so that Yen could bring it to the stage.

“They met with me, and there was older man…who was a paperboy at the time and he interacted with the Chinese workers. He said he hid under the floorboards when the men had time off in their camps, and waited for coins to drop down and collect them,” she said.

“So there was those stories that people kindly told me, lots of stories. You know when you start looking for something, things come sometimes?”

Through gathering these threads together, Yen now weaves an epic tale of brotherhood and resilience in Slow Boat, charting the Chinese refugees’ journey from poverty and war in rural China, to indentured labour mining phosphate for the British on Nauru Island, then a hasty escape from the Japanese to Australia and eventually Bulimba, and all the challenges they overcame on the way.

“On Nauru Island at the time my father was there, there would have been roughly about 1,000 Chinese workers there,” Yen said.

“When Japan bombed Pearl Harbour and the US entered the war in the Pacific, then the Japanese military was going to take Nauru.

“So the allies evacuated 480 of the Chinese men off Nauru…and brought them to Brisbane.

“So these 580 Chinese men were evacuated very hurriedly with just the clothes on their back to Brisbane, arriving here 8th of March, 1942.”

She said it’s amazing seeing this history come to life for the Brisbane Festival, sharing an important local story that could have been lost.

“It’s an Australian story, and it’s a very universal story with the question of, when everything’s out of your control, when you’re caught in a riff of war for example, how do you survive and thrive?,” she said.

“And we’ve investigated culture and arts, and community and resilience, and forgiveness, mercy, as things that help you survive and thrive, because there was a lot of tough times for these men on their journey basically, from war-torn China to hard work on Nauru, to hard work in Central Australia, to Bulimba.

“All the actors really want to tell this story too, this history of their ancestors, our ancestors, like their interaction with Australia, what happened to a group of wartime refugees who landed in the middle of Australia during World War Two.

“It’s not all happy, happy, happy. Australia had what was known as the White Australia policy at the time, the immigration restrictions as well.

“I just hope a lot of people come and share in this story, because I feel like stories can help us build bridges between people. And that’s the reason I’m doing it, to help build bridges of understanding between people, but also within ourselves. Hopefully we can understand a bit more of our own lives, by sharing good well-told stories.”

Slow Boat is playing at Brisbane Powerhouse as part of the Brisbane Festival until September 10.