Then Now Next: Drastic on Plastic (RTRFM at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery)

RTRFM (or 6UVS as it was once called) and WA women in music go hand in glove.

Before the heady days of file sharing on the internet, women listened to important vinyl—that took weeks to arrive via snail mail—in lounge rooms with their friends.

That is, until Drastic on Plastic began in 1983 which was borne of the need to hear more women in music.

As the Drastic founders recall, Ann Tonks—who had been presenting a program called Women in Rock—was relocating to Adelaide and didn’t want to lose the spot to other programming. Ann approached eventual DoP co-founder Lorraine Clifford and asked if she’d like to take over .

Listen to more of their recollections (including the very first Drastic) below.

In May of 2021, RTRFM takes over the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at UWA to highlight the amazing, trail-blazing and defiant women who have made the station—and WA music—what it is.

Since its founding in 1977, RTRFM has been hell-bent on helping blaze a trail for women within the industry. As an Artist in Residence at UWA’s Lawrence Wilson Gallery, we’ll continue to do just that with the audio-visual exhibit Then Now Next, featuring photos, stories and ephemera that reveal WA music’s untold feminist history.

Whether they were on the march, behind the mic, on the door, behind the bar, on the stage or behind the scenes, RTRFM will be paying tribute to the women who deserve to be up front and applauded.

Running from 11 May to 5 June 2021, Then Now Next will offer insights and stories from the past five decades, and hopefully, inspire the next generation of women to keep ‘burning down the house’.

*Correction: In one of the interview excerpts, Lorraine Clifford incorrectly states that Ann Tonks was Station Manager in 1983, and that there were eight original members of the DoP collective, when there were in fact seven.