[2] Her more recent roles include having appeared in the 2011 TV movie Panic at Rock Island and the television shows Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries in 2013 and Winter in 2015.
[8][9] After studying drama for three years, Smart secured her first ever professional acting role at age 25 when she signed a two-year contract to play Lucinda Croft, the tomboyish niece of old-fashioned school principal Donald Fisher, in the popular soap opera Home and Away.
[12] Despite this early success however, Smart did not enjoy her work on the show and in December 1991, a mere eight months into her contract, she gave magazine TV Week a "scathing" interview about her role,[13] telling the publication that she felt as though she was completing a "prison sentence", adding that "It feels like I've been here for years".
[11] The Seven Network, Home and Away's broadcast channel, as well as the show's producers were naturally annoyed by Smart's comments but couldn't release her from her contract since storylines were planned in advance and her character would have to remain in the series for "some time yet".
[12] In the following years, Smart unsuccessfully attempted to launch a singing career,[15][16] posed nude in the magazine Black+White,[17][18] performed on stage in a handful of plays in Australia and Christmas pantomimes in the United Kingdom alongside her Home and Away love interest Bruce Roberts and did not return to the screen until 1994 when she was cast by student director Samantha Lang in her Graduate short film Audacious, which went on to screen at a number of film festivals across the world, winning some awards along the way.
She continued her stage endeavors the next year, appearing in two plays, but also went on working in front of the camera, starring in the television film Blackwater Trail and the feature Back of Beyond, which reunited her with Home and Away co-star Rebekah Elmaloglou.
The highly anticipated comedy, which premiered out-of-competition at the Cannes Film Festival, was a critical and commercial flop and remains Smart's last theatrical feature to date.
[8][21] This changed in 1999 when she was cast as Detective Senior Constable Alex St. Clare in the police procedural Water Rats, a role which she actively pursued, enduring five auditions over three months.
[26] Smart did not work much in the ten years following the birth of her daughter and the end of Water Rats, save for two episodes of the TV show The Alice in 2005 and 2006 and a month-long stint on the play Burnt Piano in early 2008.