By arts editor HELEN MUSA

Five years after the dramatic fall of Kabul, when hundreds of public servants and defence personnel from Canberra worked around the clock on Australia’s evacuation mission following the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021, and now Canberra troubadour and 2023 CityNews Artist of the Year Fred Smith will return to the Australian War Memorial with Unforgotten: Songs of Australians at War.

The performance offers a gritty personal account of the realities faced by Australian soldiers in overseas conflicts while asking timely questions about the costs, and the value, of Australia’s military alliances.

Part concert and part history lesson, Unforgotten traces the Australian experience of war through songs by Henry Lawson, Eric Bogle, Don Walker and John Schumann before moving into Smith’s own firsthand accounts of Afghanistan.

Accompanied by projected photographs and delivered with his trademark laconic humour, the songs honour those who served while reflecting on the human consequences of war.

Smith’s connection to Afghanistan runs far deeper than that of a songwriter and the lyrics of his song Sapper’s Lullaby are engraved in marble at the Australian plot in the British War Cemetery in Kabul.

In 2009 he became the first Australian diplomat posted to work alongside Australian soldiers in Uruzgan Province, remaining until 2013. During that time, he wrote songs and staged regular concerts with Australian, American and Dutch troops as well as Afghan interpreters. Those experiences became the album Dust of Uruzgan and later a memoir of the same name, published by Allen & Unwin in 2016.

In 2020 Smith returned to Afghanistan with the Australian Embassy. When Kabul fell to the Taliban the following year, he found himself working from Kabul International Airport as part of Australia’s mission to evacuate Australian passport holders and Afghan visa recipients. Back in Australia, while completing hotel quarantine, he wrote the 70,000-word memoir The Sparrows of Kabul, later combining his account of the evacuation with his earlier songs in the stage production Sparrows of Kabul.

In recognition of his work as a diplomat, musician and unofficial storyteller of Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan, Smith was awarded an OAM in 2025.

Now, Unforgotten: Songs of Australians at War brings together decades of music, diplomacy and lived experience in what Smith describes as the culmination of a long commitment to telling the stories of Australians at war.

Unforgotten: Songs of Australians at War, Australian War Memorial, August 13.

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