Back to Bilo Script Now Available
Back to Bilo — you can see it live on stage at Darwin Festival this August, or get your hands on your own copy of the script, hot off the press from Playlab Theatre.
We can’t wait to share this production and its important story with you.
OVERVIEW
Back to Bilo is a true-life testimony to people power and persistence. This text draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with the people at the heart of the story: Priya, Nades, Angela, Bronwyn, Simone, Vashini, and many of the Home to Bilo campaign team.
Back to Bilo is not a documentary or a literal retelling — that script would be four and half years long, with a cast of thousands! Instead, it is a carefully woven selection of the story’s key elements, capturing the heart of the Home to Bilo movement: the courage and resilience of Nades and Priya, the unwavering determination of the Biloela community, and the action of hundreds of thousands of everyday Australians who demanded more from our government. This story unfolds against the backdrop of a political climate where fear and division have long dominated the national discourse on Australia’s asylum policy
SYNOPSIS
Love is stronger than fear. Back to Bilo is the remarkable true account of one family’s ordeal through immigration detention, and how persistence and community can win against crushing odds. Priya and Nades left war-torn Sri Lanka and found each other in regional Queensland. They married, had two daughters, worked hard, and settled into a happy country life. The town of Biloela welcomed them with open arms. Four years later there was a knock at the door, and they were ripped away in a dawn raid. Their story could have ended there, but the community weren’t giving up so easily. Fighting alongside the young refugee family, the women of Bileola launched a grassroots campaign that galvanised ordinary Australians, and demanded the family be brought back to Bilo. A profoundly moving new play from Belloo Creative (Boy, Lost), made with — and from — the heart of regional Queensland.
