No one will ever forget the footage of people clinging to a US Airforce carrier as it left Kabul Airport in August 2021.
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Diplomat and songwriter Fred Smith was part of the Australian team working from Kabul Airport to get former Australian government staff and thousands of others through the human logjam at the airport's gates and out of Afghanistan as the Taliban entered Kabul and seized control of the country.
Mr Smith has written a show, Sparrows of Kabul, that offers his personal account of the whole Australian experience in Afghanistan.
"I am as much a story teller as a musician," he said.
He went to Afghanistan in 2009 to be the first Australian diplomat to be working alongside Australian troops in Uruzgan province.
He was the last to leave in 2013.
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"From that experience I released an album Dust of Uruzgan," Mr Smith said.
He returned to Afghanistan in April 2020 and worked there until the evacuation of Kabul in August 2021.
"When I got back from Kabul it was the most intense thing I have ever experienced and it took me weeks to be able to sleep properly."
So much of Australia's international work is unseen, sometimes deliberately kept from the public view. Fred Smith continues to shine a light on Australia's involvement in many troubled parts of the world. He tells the stories that governments can't - or won't.
- Zena Armstrong, director of the Cobargo Folk Festival and a former senior diplomat.
He was so moved by the various stories and experiences in Afghanistan that he wrote Sparrows of Kabul.
"Sparrows of Kabul really covers the whole arc between 2009 and 2021," he said.
He said that the situation in Afghanistan is "infinitely complicated" and has found that while performing those songs in Australia "there was a real appetite to understand what it was all about".
"I try to convey those complexities and the moral ambiguities and give people a sense of empathy for both the soldiers and the Afghans," Mr Smith said.
He will be singing songs, including some from his Dust of Uruzgan album, with a band.
Photographs will be projected behind him to illustrate the Sparrows of Kabul song cycle.
"Audiences are moved by empathy for the characters but also that their intelligence has been respected.
"One person said they learnt more from the two-hour show than from 20 years of television coverage," Mr Smith said.
The show has humour in parts which softens the experience and Mr Smith said he was surprised that critics described it as uplifting.
The Yuin Folk Club has secured Mr Smith and his band to perform Sparrows of Kabul at 3pm, Saturday, August 12, at the Cobargo School of Arts Hall.
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