art and language teacher, exhibition organiser, theatrical entrepreneur and property developer, was born in Angoulême, France on 31 July 1824, third son of Auguste Alexis and Rose Elizabeth Joubert and a younger brother of Didier Numa Joubert . Educated at a school in Bordeaux and at the College Bourbon in Paris, he left France for New Zealand in May 1839 then came to Sydney in the Martha at the end of the year. After working as an interpreter in the corvette Aube , he returned to Sydney in 1841. In January 1844 he was advertising from Lower George Street (the Rocks) as a 'French and Drawing’ teacher 'desirous of obtaining a few pupils’. No drawings, however, are known. After his marriage to Florence Clara Imlac Owen in St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral on 27 April 1848, Joubert became a property developer in Adelaide – where his wife, son and daughter died of typhoid fever and he went to prison for debt. Having re-established himself on the Victorian goldfields in 1852, then as a victualler to the French forces in New Caledonia and a trader to Madagascar, he married Adelaide Levi in Christ Church, North Adelaide, on 27 February 1855 then joined his brother at Hunter’s Hill, Sydney. Together they developed the peninsula, Jules apparently initiating various grandiose schemes and Didier completing or continuing them after the inevitable financial collapse, e.g. when Jules was declared bankrupt in 1866.
As honorary and subsequently, paid, secretary of the Agricultural Society of NSW from 1867, Jules was largely responsible for moving the society’s modest annual show from Parramatta to Sydney and enlarging it to include an intercolonial art exhibition and other non-agricultural features (the foundation of the continuing Royal Easter Show). He also edited the society’s Journal . Exhibition organisation proved to be his forte. He played a major part in expanding colonial Australian representation in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial and the 1878 Paris international exhibitions. Arranging the French participation in the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition led to the award of chevalier of the Legion of Honour from France – and to a political scandal in Sydney (for shipping private property to France as returning exhibits), culminating in his dismissal by the Agricultural Society.
Quitting Sydney for a wider sphere Joubert arranged international exhibitions for Perth (1881) and Christchurch, New Zealand (1882) – both with R.E.N. Twopeny. He spent the rest of 1882 and 1883 organising the Calcutta International Exhibition. After a brief Melbourne career as a theatrical agent, during which he erected the Alexandra Theatre and again went bankrupt, he was in charge of New South Wales exhibits to the 1888 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition. Then he organised international exhibitions for Dunedin (NZ) in 1889-90 and for the two Tasmanian centres, Launceston (1891-92) and Hobart (1894-95). At none of these, however, is he known to have shown any art of his own. He died at Carlton, Melbourne on 24 August 1907, survived by his second wife, eight sons and two daughters. His published reminiscences, Shavings and Scrapes in Many Parts (Dunedin, 1890), make no mention of his brother.
