By arts editor HELEN MUSA

Five years after the fall of Kabul and the end of Australia’s longest war, the Australian War Memorial has unveiled an immersive new installation drawing on eyewitness accounts, personal messages and artefacts from the evacuation of Afghanistan, in which about 4100 people were brought to safety.

At the heart of the new Afghanistan gallery are contemporary records and video footage donated by musician, diplomat and author Fred Smith, who was working to help evacuate Afghan nationals during the Taliban takeover in August 2021.

Smith’s broken mobile phone and guitar, both used during the evacuation, are now part of the National Collection alongside footage, songs, poems and records documenting the frantic final days at Hamid Karzai International Airport.

“When your visa is on your phone and your battery dies, that can mean the difference between getting out or being left behind,” Smith says, “Every day we told people: take an extra phone charger, keep your passport close, don’t push, don’t argue, just keep moving.”

Memorial director Matt AndersonAustralia’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, said the new gallery reflected the complexity of the conflict and its aftermath.

“You only have to spend time in the Afghanistan gallery to realise it’s complicated,” he said. “Every person who served experienced a different Afghanistan, and that is what the new galleries are trying to reflect.”

Australian War Memorial curator Victoria Poppins said the installation brought together the lived experiences of Afghan civilians, photojournalists, Australian veterans and organisations involved in the evacuation.

The multimedia installation combines images of desperate crowds at Kabul airport with real-time WhatsApp messages from Afghans seeking escape and Australians trying to help them. It depicts the crush of people navigating suicide bombers, sewage canals, Covid-19 restrictions, extreme heat and the uncertainty of whether they would survive the Taliban’s return.

“What visitors see in the new Afghanistan gallery is our first draft of this history,” Anderson said. “We have no official history, yet. This is the first draft.”

Fred Smith’s Unforgotten: Songs of Australians at War, is at the Australian War Memorial, August 13.

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