Beloved TV presenter Penny Spence, who was one of Australia’s first female newsreaders, has died aged 83. Her cause of death has not been confirmed. Her death was announced in a social media statement by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. It read: “We’re saddened to hear of the passing of Penny Spence, a trailblazer in Australian television. Spence was part of a pioneering group of women who were the first women to read television news in Australia.”<\/p>\n
In a statement to Mediaweek, Fiona Dear, Nine\u2019s Director of News and Current Affairs said: \u201cPenny was a trailblazer for women in our industry, laying the path for countless women in television. With two Logies awarded to her, she was one of the country\u2019s most high profile news presenters for decades, and was one of the icons who made 9News \u2018still the one\u2019. Her legacy lives on in TV newsrooms across the country and we send our condolences to her family.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Channel Nine legend rose to fame in the late 1960s and presented the afternoon bulletin in New South Wales for the channel, while Brian Henderson anchored the evening version.<\/p>\n
Spencer was given a Logie Award for Most Popular Female Personality in NSW in 1969.<\/p>\n
Tributes have flooded in for the newsreading legend, as one persons said: “I remember Penny as one of the best executives involved in children’s television in the 1980s. Vale.”<\/p>\n
Another added: “Very sad to hear this.”<\/p>\n
Following her time at Channel Nine, Spencer worked behind the scenes, as she headed children’s programming at the Nine Network.<\/p>\n
She then served as Executive Producer of the European Broadcasting Union\u2019s children’s unit, and was at the helm of the popular 1985 Ray Meagher mini-series Colour in the Creek.<\/p>\n
Spence also worked on a number of hit films including Shipmates (1987), Sovereign Hill (1990), Hinkler: The Aviator (1990), and The Water Trolley (1988), which received an International Emmy nomination,<\/p>\n
She was the first wife of Channel Nine musical director Geoff Harvey, who died in 2019, and leaves behind daughters Eugenie and Charlotte.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beloved TV presenter Penny Spence, who was one of Australia’s first female newsreaders, has died aged 83. Her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2283,4471,4469,4470,96,59,4468,4472,4474,4473,4467,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-7715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-celebrity-deaths","9":"tag-channel-9","10":"tag-channel-nine","11":"tag-channel-nine-presenters","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-gb","14":"tag-penny-spence","15":"tag-penny-spence-dead","16":"tag-penny-spence-death","17":"tag-penny-spence-news","18":"tag-tv-radio-section","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}