Elements of this story might distress readers.

The Shoe-Horn Sonata (1995), a controversial play telling the harrowing story of Australian nurses captured by the Japanese in World War II, and of their own country’s attempts to write them out of history, returns to Canberra (Mill Theatre at Dairy Road, 10 to 27 April) – the first time the work has been staged here since the nineties.

Half a century after their liberation from Japanese POW camps in Sumatra, two women – Bridie Cartwright (Andrea Close), an Aussie battler and member of the Australian Army nursing corps, and Sheila Richards (Zsuzsi Soboslay), a British citizen who moved to Fremantle after the war – are interviewed for a television documentary. They confront both the Australian Government’s secrets – and a secret one of them has kept for 50 years.

It is, director Lexi Sekuless says, “a beautiful story” about the “remarkable resilience” of World War II nurses.

“It’s a very important Australian story,” playwright John Misto said. “They were sent off to fight for their country and defend it, and they got no thanks for it… These are the heroes nobody wants. The awful thing was they died, knowing no-one wanted them, and their struggles had been useless. We owe it to their memory to make sure they’re not crushed by history and pushed into a footnote.”

In 1945, 24 Australian army nurses were rescued from three and a half years of captivity in Japanese POW camps on Sumatra, at Muntok and Belalau. They had endured starvation, torture, and disease in conditions worse than Changi. They were forced to eat grass and ferns, rats and snakes, and glue to survive, and to pull rusting nails out of the wall, boil them, and drink that water to get iron. When they were released, a month after the end of the war, they weighed less than 32 kilograms.

They were the survivors. Sixty-five nurses had been evacuated after the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Twelve died when the Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk; 21 (and one civilian) were raped and killed in the Bangka Island massacre; and eight died in captivity.

“I can’t think of any military group that suffered as much as these women,” Mr Misto said. “Sixty-five went out, 24 came home, many of them with life-threatening illnesses, all of them with massive post-traumatic stress. ‘If they’d been men,’ one of them said to me, ‘if I picked up a gun and shot a Japanese, there would be suburbs named after me.’”

But the army and successive Australian governments did not want to know. The nurses, Mr Misto said, were denied disability pensions, because the government declared they had suffered no permanent damage; instead, they were paid sixpence a day for each day of their captivity. They were told not to march on Anzac Day, because they had contributed nothing to the war effort. They were told they would be dead within a decade, and not to marry; some lived for another half-century.

They were prevented from telling their stories: the army destroyed their diaries, which they had risked their lives to keep secret, and the government ordered Vivian Bullwinkel, the only survivor of the Bangka Island massacre, not to testify to the 1946 war crimes tribunal that she and the women killed that day had been raped.

Decades later, the government rejected their requests for commemorative postage stamps (1993) and for a memorial (1994), and foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans lobbied (1995) against ex-POWs suing the Japanese government for damages. (An Indonesian businessman, meanwhile, paid for a memorial on Radji Beach, Bangka Island.)

The nurses, Mr Misto says, were “crushed” by what happened to them.

“We knew the Japanese would treat us badly,” one told him. “It was war; we expected that. We did not expect our country to turn against us when we came home.”

Partly, Mr Misto says, it was shame: “They were embarrassed that they left these women, and that many of them had been raped and murdered.”

The British Empire had thought that Singapore could not be taken, and left it almost defenceless; the evacuation of the nurses from Singapore was delayed until the last moment; and two army majors fled in an ambulance, abandoning the nurses – a “shocking betrayal” for which those officers were never punished.

Partly it was the establishment’s view of what women should do: be ‘ministering angels’ rather than operate under gunfire.

“The army never wanted them; it didn’t believe that women should be near the frontline of battle,” Mr Misto said. “And that was it. In many senses … they regarded them as getting the punishment they deserved.”

And after the war, the Australian and British governments “were eager to reassert themselves in Southeast Asia, and so they didn’t want any ugly publicity,” Mr Misto said.

“The government response [was] these people were expendable. It’s Realpolitik, it’s Machiavellian…

“I don’t think anything’s changed. If the government felt it was in their interest to crush a new group of people, they’d do it without hesitation.”

Finally, in 1999, the Australian War Memorial unveiled a memorial to Australian service nurses on Anzac Parade, and last year, a statue of Lt.-Col. Vivian Bullwinkel – the first statue of a nurse, or indeed a woman, at the Memorial.

Mr Misto’s play was instrumental: he had written The Shoe-Horn Sonata as part of a campaign for a memorial to the nurses. Audiences started a petition that received 20,000 signatures, and he donated his $20,000 prize money to a fund for the memorial.

The story had fascinated him ever since his school days when he read White Coolies (1954), survivor Betty Jeffrey’s memoir, a heavily censored account based on her diary.

But the subject matter was controversial, many theatre companies refused to stage it, and there was hostility to the play when it opened, Mr Misto said.

Nevertheless, The Shoe-horn Sonata won both the Australia Remembers National Play Competition (1995) and the Play Award for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. The Sydney Morning Herald recognised it as “a modern Australian classic”, and The Daily Telegraph as “truly a masterpiece by a sensitive and intuitive Australian playwright”. It sold 60,000 copies, and was on the NSW syllabus for two decades; Mr Misto visited schools with one of the survivors, who talked about how she forgave the Japanese. When the Queensland Theatre Company staged it, Mr Misto says, audiences refused to leave the theatre after it was over: “They demanded that the actresses come back onstage and explain why these women had been written out of history.”

“The general public wants to know about [the nurses],” Mr Misto said. “All the schools we spoke to and the teachers were incredibly supportive of the play. They said: ‘We can’t let these women be forgotten. Why should they be forgotten because they were women?’ That’s it, really… Women weren’t important in the overall military picture, even if they were officers and fighting for their country.”

But Mr Misto was blacklisted. Several government-funded theatre companies told him that as part of his punishment for writing The Shoe-Horn Sonata, they would never stage his future plays, he said. (He finds it ironic that he now relies on productions of his work in Eastern Europe, including Moscow.)

Even today, the play strikes a nerve: Ms Sekuless says that the RSL ACT sub-branch rejected her invitation to the play, and that the War Memorial showed little interest. Conversely, the Japanese Embassy had been “amazing”; the cultural attaché came to rehearsals and helped to make sure the cast pronounced certain words accurately.

“The point of the play is not really about what the Japanese guards did,” Ms Sekuless said. “It’s about the pitiful compensation; it’s about the fact that there are still bodies; and it was an Indonesian businessman who paid for the memorial [on Bangka Island]. The massive embarrassment is even more reason why it’s a play that should be done.”

The Shoe-Horn Sonata is, the programme notes say, a work “in which unspeakable brutality was punctuated by moments of heroism, tenderness and even a gentle humour”.

“We have this Australian ideal of mateship,” Mr Misto says. “But … women have a stronger bond of mateship than men. That was one of the things I tried to bring out in this play, that the myth of mateship doesn’t just attach itself to men. Also, we choose our heroes very carefully. Simpson and his donkey were wonderful, but what these army nurses did was, for my money, 100 times better: saving lives under fire, getting shot, being massacred – they really did serve their country, and they paid a terrible price for it.”

Ms Sekuless wants to open theatre to different audiences; this play is for the defence and veteran communities – and Mr Misto believes those groups should see it.

“How much has changed, really?” Mr Misto wondered. “People, institutions will always act in self-interest. I think every female soldier should go and see this play, just to know what she’s possibly likely to encounter, should life get difficult in the services. Everyone in the army should see it – and the higher up, the better.”

The Shoe-Horn Sonata had its previews last week, and audiences have been enthusiastic.

“WONDERFUL,” Professor Kim Rubenstein, law expert and human rights advocate, wrote on Facebook. “The actors are brilliant, the play is so moving and a reminder of women’s profound experiences during war. It’s a MUST – go book tickets if you can!”

The Shoe-Horn Sonata, 3 to 27 April, Mill Theatre, Building 3.3, 1 Dairy Road, Fyshwick. Tickets $40 to $50, from Humanitix.