[1] She was posted to New York City in 1965 as foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald,[a] the more serious broadsheet sister of the tabloid Sun-Herald, to share offices with the rock music journalist Lillian Roxon.
She experienced overt professional sex discrimination from the National Press Club, which did not admit woman members, effectively barring her from important presentations.
With the Whitlam government's normalisation of relations with China, the foreign editor, Stephen Claypole, had Jones open a bureau for John Fairfax Ltd. in Peking (now Beijing) in 1973, despite her having no knowledge of Mandarin.
For six months, Western journalists suffered official restrictions in reaction to the release of Chung Kuo, Cina, Michelangelo Antonioni's documentary on China.
She returned to Australia to take up an appointment as Literary Editor, but regretted not being in China to witness the death of Mao Zedong, the rise and fall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution.
She died in the Sydney coastal suburb of Bondi in July 2006 and was privately cremated; a week later a wake was held for her friends and colleagues.
Jones' professionalism and refusal to be sidelined did much to overcome prejudice against female journalists, and the current improvement in gender balance can in some way be attributed to her.