She took a leading role in creating memorials to the Australian nurses of World War Two.

Her father was Methodist minister and she had an elder brother William Eric Archer Hughes-Jones who became a leading surgeon.

[2] She became a nurse and a matron and she was able to find funds to buy the Windarra hospital where she had worked.

Australia was outraged and Hughes-Jones established the Centaur War Nurses' Memorial Trust and she became its honorary secretary.

The hospital was sold in 1998 but the foundation survives and it gives grants to "continue Edith Hughes-Jones legacy".