Ellen Mary Kent Hughes

Ellen Mary Kent Hughes, (29 August 1893 – 16 May 1979) was an Australian medical doctor and council alderman. She was the first woman to serve on a local government council in Queensland, serving on the Kingaroy Shire Council from 1923 to 1924. Hughes was the eldest of seven children of Wilfred Kent Hughes, a surgeon, and his wife Clementina Rankin, who had been a nurse in England. Hughes was the niece of Rev. Ernest Selwyn Hughes, Frederic Hughes and Eva Hughes and through her mother, first cousin of Philip Seaforth James. Two of her siblings, Wilfrid Kent Hughes and Gwendolen Kent Lloyd, would also achieve significance in the community. Hughes attended Ruyton Girls' School, Kew. She left school in 1912 while her mother was in a hospital for tuberculosis. Hughes married Paul René Loubet of France and a medical-assistant at the Children's Hospital, Melbourne in July 1917. Loubet died three months after they married. Hughes was pregnant with their child.

Medical career Hughes' colleagues assisted her in finding work after her husband's death, at Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital for Women and Children. She was a resident at the Hospital during the influenza and diphtheria epidemics of 1919 where she took the responsibility almost single-handedly for 200 desperately ill children. Her son was cared for by his nanny, Alice Pickup, who would reside with Hughes for 54 years. A locum job became available in Mitchell, a town west of Brisbane. Hughes took the job. She met Francis Garde Wesley Wilson and in August 1920, Hughes married Garde Wilson. They had four children together. The family moved to Kingaroy.

Kent Hughes was elected to the Kingaroy Shire Council in an extraordinary election on 7 July 1923, becoming the first woman to serve on a Queensland local government council. She had been nominated by the Queensland Country Women's Association and the Queensland Women's Electoral League.

The family moved to Armidale in 1928, where Kent Hughes opened a medical practice with Roger Mallam, and continued her active community work. She worked as an Honorary paediatrician at the Armidale and New England Hospital, government medical officer and a justice of the peace. Kent Hughes was particularly interested in indigenous women's health, which remained one of her interests throughout her life.

Kent Hughes served as an alderman from 1937 to 1968 in the Armidale City Council. She was Deputy Mayor from 1963 to 1964. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1968. She became a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 1971, and was awarded the freedom of the city of Armidale in 1975.

On 26 October 2001, a memorial to Kent Huges was officially unveiled by Nita Cunningham in King Street, Kingaroy in O'Neill Square, outside the former Kingaroy railway station.

In 2011, the forecourt in front of the South Burnett Regional Council Chambers in Glendon Street, Kingaroy, was named in her honour (the South Burnett Regional Council being the successor of the Kingaroy Shire Council). However, there was a Facebook campaign to name it after cricketer Matthew Hayden, describing Kent Hughes as "an obscure politician". There was no change to the name of the forecourt, but it was proposed to name another venue after Hayden.

A scholarship was established in her name in 2016, to encourage young women of the South Burnett Region, where Hughes had been a young doctor, to pursue a tertiary education.