How a 'hard graft' life in the bush led Dawn to a pioneering TV career

Mrs Kenyon, née Dingwall, was one of the first women on Australian screens but she always preferred working behind the scenes in television production.

Born in Toowoomba, Queensland in 1932, she spent her childhood in Mount Isa where her father had taken a job in the mines after the Great Depression.

As a teenager she went to school at Fairholme College in Toowoomba and would take three days to travel home for school holidays.

"Mum would think nothing of spending 72 hours on a train to see her parents. What would seem like forever to us now was just part of travel in those days." her daughter Anne Kenyon said.

She seized opportunities and took challenges in her stride "all the way through, from the beginning to the end of her life. Nothing phased her."

Mrs Kenyon started on Romper Room in 1956 when the show launched as a 15-minute segment within kids program Captain Fortune, starring Alan Herbert, on ATN-7.

It was expanded into a standalone show which ran until 1988 under a range of different hosts.

"I loved to have viewer participation," she said in an interview with author Brendan Horgan in 2000.

Mrs Kenyon welcomed a diverse group of kids, including children with disabilities, to appear on Romper Room.

"I wanted it to be very Australian, lots of Australian children on it and a lot of participation from the viewers," she said.

"I wanted the show to be entertaining, first and foremost it's got to be entertaining."

Romper Room was "a mixture of physical activities and simple moral lessons", the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) said.

Mrs Kenyon worked at radio 5KA Adelaide and CBC in Canada before landing a job as ATN7 Sydney's first coordinating producer of children's programs in 1956.

She married television engineer Fred Kenyon in 1957, a fellow TV pioneer who received a Medal of the Order of Australia for services to television and who died in 2020.

The couple had three children Steven, who died in 2016, Anne and Peter.

She died a week before her 92nd birthday in Wahroonga on January 20, 2024 but her death was publicly revealed on June 20.