BridgeFM has been an incorporated body for 3 years yet it really all goes back much further. If you like we take our roots from the original 6BY AM Station in Yornup. That was our community radio station servicing the Lower South West.

Remember Rob Wheatley who was one of our local radio personalities born and raised in Bridgetown, what a great guy. Remember the morning talk back show where anybody had a say and Robs gentlemanly manner in dealing with the tricky issues. ABC morning man Liam Bartlet worked for a time at 6BY he'd have some stories to tell.

We have also had some amazing personality's that either through the Repertory Theatre or Radio have gone on to great things.

Collaboration Blues in 2001 was a scaled down operation yet just as effective. After cutting our teeth on 2000 we found how we could do this with similar results yet on a shoe string budget, we had to.

We still had 6 Videographers, 5 still camera people and 4 people in the IT centre streaming with live updates of the Site. This operation ran 18 hours each day.

Bridge FM with the aid of Mike Nix our IT specialist started broadcasting on the Friday night and finally went to sleep early Sunday morning.

It took another week to finalise the site and pack it away for another year.

So streaming a weekend festival is not for the faint hearted.

Bridge FM almost started to feel as if we knew what we were doing by 2002 as it all comes down to experience and human input, we had another good team with the same key personnel.

Once again 15 of us worked like people possessed to deliver the show. This is just part of the reason that Bridge FM exists, people helping people for the betterment of our community. This is also what the Blues Festival is all about as its driven by a small volunteer community and is now considered one of the best festivals in Australia.

Unfortunatly most of the digital still images that were taken over the 3 years were stored in IInet's Server. The committee chose not to use the photo's on their site when they hired another web designer. To the best of my knowledge all of the archive data that was housed within the site was lost. So apart from some information that I as the web master and designer held onto for personnel reasons all was lost. Digital film from the 3 years still remain as a historic record of the festival yet nothing of great significance was shot in 2004.

BridgeFM was concieved to help groups such as The Blues at Bridgetown Festival promote their needs. Over the last 6 years we have either photographed the Blues, created graphics for the Festival Promotion the Web Sites for 1998 - 1999 - 2000 and 2001 and designed the first Bridgetown Community web sites.

2000 Blues This was a significant moment in Australian Music and IT Tech. history as we were the first live to air Internet Festival broadcast over 54 hours with Telstra's new server in Sydney. Telstra also established a return satellite feed so we could watch it here projected on a big screen, 2 minutes later, we became the their test case. Yes it was lots of work but the results were big fun.

During the 2000 Festival there were 16 people filming, 6 working with still cameras and 5 people in our net studio. Nancy Jones from Blue Moon Film and Video and her crew from Channel 31 helped to make the event a total success filming in the Blue Owls Nest Venue.

Graham Bishop from Frog Prints (Bunbury) also joined our crew as our roving street Videographer and has continued to be a integral part of the team since.

BridgeFM Blues at Bridgetown
Web Site and Streaming History

BridgeFM was told that our services were not required for the 2003 Blues Festival which was a pitty for the wider community.

We were ready to jump in and give it our all again yet the Blues Festival Committee decided against streaming.

I (Kim Perrier) personnally think they made a grave error as we had created an International following in excess of 200,000+ people or (web site hits).

I appologise to all that may read this for not being able to continue our efforts.

Who knows maybe a new committee or new insight will some day realise that its important to the Town and the Lower Southwest of WA.