Fred's debut album Soapbox gained cult status in his home town Canberra selling over 3000 copies. After its release, he traveled to work with Peace Monitoring operations in Bougainville, an island province of Papua New Guinea that recently emerged from ten years of bitter civil war. Fred became something of a celebrity on Bougainville collaborating with local musicians and the Australian Army to record and release 20,000 copies of a cassette of peace songs in the Melanesian pidgin dialect.