Then Now Next: On the Stage (RTRFM at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery)

You can’t be what you can’t see. Thankfully, there have been plenty of trailblazing WA women who’ve forced their way onto stages—at times when the industry was hardly welcoming—to make themselves known.

Today on RTRFM, and in our venues, their creative progenies own the space, and the scene. We’ve collected some audio of these iconic women, featured on RTRFM’s airwaves and at our events, below. Sink in.

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’.

Image: Thea Woodward of The Tommyhawks at In The Pines, 2018. Photograph by Sebastian Mrugalski