He received a $1500 Arts ACT grant to record his first album, Soapbox, in 1998 – “a combination of comic material and thinking man’s drinking songs” and since then has divided his time between DFAT work, composing songs and writing books, performing and recording.Smith is the only artist to have won two National Film and Sound Archive National Folk Recording Awards, for Bagarap Empires (2002) and Urban Sea Shanties (2009).