WILLIAM Yang has been dining out on the same story for years very publicly, and if you’ve ever heard it, you won’t forget it.

The story concerns his childhood in a remote northern Queensland town on the Atherton Tableland, when one day at school a bully chanted the words “Ching Chong Chinaman…ha ha ha ha”. It had never occurred to the youthful William Young (his Anglicised birth name) that he was anything but a true blue Aussie and his mother was forced to confront him with the unpleasant truth  from which she and her husband had endeavoured to shield their children.

So memorable is the story that he has  been unashamedly recycling it for years ever since he first did it on stage in his show “The North,” the prototype of his stage productions and first seen by Canberrans at the National Festival of Australian Theatre.

His formula is simple: Yang narrates, sparingly, with wry, deliberate comments on the world he has experienced and photographed. In the background, usually to a musical score, are huge projections of Yang’s brilliant photography.

This reaches its apogee in “Blood Links”, now showing in Canberra for two weeks and based on director Martin Fox’s 2014 film of the same name. Among the dozens of projected family snaps are photographs of his mother, who met his father in Cairns. Caught between the Chinese tradition of economically sound marriage and the Hollywood tradition of marriage for love – she married for both. But we also see her in the context of her forbears and her Australian extended family.

Yang, his brother and sister are pictured at the height of assimilationist Australia and were brought up just like other Queensland kids. But that small world has expanded and slow, piece by piece, Yang takes us the audience on a journey around the world as he traces his family’s journey, and his own.

Certainly, the camera goes outside to the anthill-infested landscape near of his hometown Dimbulah, and closeup on some mouth-watering meals, but for the larger part the focus is on his relatives, ordinary people who lived their lives and worked hard in an atmosphere where to be Chinese was counted a liability.

Very occasionally there is drama – a family murder followed by a family rift, but Yang does not build it melodramatically, preferring simple reportage. His is not an artful kind of storytelling but rather something like a quiet reflection.

Yang’s history in Sydney’s art scene provided rich fodder for films and plays like “My Generation”, commissioned for the opening of the National Portrait Gallery in 2008 but in “Blood Links,” he returns to the exploration of his Chinese ancestry, a process he took on seriously, along with a commitment to Daoism, in the 1980s well before the full flowering of multiculturalism in Australia. His journey into the Chinese diaspora sees Yang meeting relatives both rich and poor, married to Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and white Australians. Most, like him, do not speak Chinese but all retain a sense of family.

Yang has matured as a performer. Standing almost meditatively instead of pacing the stage, he uses few words and many contemplative, almost Zen  silences, to trace the blood links that taken him backward and forward in time, ending in a powerful affirmation of his Chinese ancestry.

This moving show is both compulsory and compulsive viewing for anybody interested in the complexity of the Australian cultural landscape.