13 Facts About Joseph Jukes

Joseph Jukes was educated at Wolverhampton, King Edward's School, Birmingham and St John's College, Cambridge.

Joseph Jukes returned to England at the end of 1840, and in 1842 sailed as a naturalist on board the corvette HMS Fly to participate in the surveying and charting expeditions to survey Torres Strait, New Guinea, and the east coast of Australia, under the leadership of Francis Price Blackwood, a naval officer.

Joseph Jukes designed this map based on a vast collection of notes he had gathered, and his own observations; notes on the structure of the coastline, his own observations during visits to other colonies, and the descriptions of other authors of various other parts of Australia.

Joseph Jukes concluded that, despite apparent consistency in geological formation, Australian soil and land was wealthy in minerals, and he formerly advised the Tasmanian Society in 1846 to conduct further geological surveys in the regions of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, and the importance of such an act.

Joseph Jukes's work provided one of the first insights into the nature of Australian geology, at a time when there was little knowledge of the continent, and when English interest was intensely focused on obtaining the geological knowledge that Joseph Jukes was able to uncover.

Joseph Jukes landed in England again in June 1846, and in August received an appointment on the geological survey of Great Britain.

In 1849, Joseph Jukes was offered the post of geological surveyor of the mineral surveying of New South Wales, back in Australia.

Joseph Jukes held this post until his death nineteen years later, in Dublin, after a fall from a horse there.

Joseph Jukes was buried on 3 August 1869 in St Mary's churchyard at Selly Oak, Birmingham.

Joseph Jukes was an admirable teacher, and his Student's Manual was the favoured textbook of British students for many years.

Joseph Jukes wrote many papers that were printed in the London and Dublin geological journals and other periodicals.

Joseph Jukes delivered a popular geological course in geology which attracted almost 400 people in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and encouraged field excursions in the area.

Joseph Jukes edited, and in great measure wrote, forty-two memoirs explanatory of the maps of the south, east and west of Ireland, and prepared a geological map of Ireland on a scale of 8 miles to an inch.