They say you should never read your old writing.

A little while ago I found myself digging through some old boxes looking for something completely unrelated when I stumbled across a copy of Interpreted Wisdom. Dusty, dog-eared and looking every bit of its age, I sat there flicking through the pages wondering what on earth twenty-years-younger Brendan had been thinking.

Some of it made me smile, some made me cringe and some I couldn’t believe I had actually written. Some of it was well written but never really aged well.

But then, I came across an old friend… my old mate Jocko.

Now before anyone starts getting their knickers in a knot… yes… that Jocko.

The little black statue standing in High Street that, over the last few months, seems to have become one of the most talked about pieces of metal in Maitland.

Funny how things work out.

Back when I first started researching him, 20 years ago, I was a lot thinner, had a lot more hair and, ohh, to be in my twenties again. Anyway, hardly anyone I knew called him Jocko. He was simply “The Little Black Boy”. If you picked up a council brochure, chances are they’d carefully avoid that altogether and, if they had to refer to him, they called him “Maitland’s Little Icon”. Safe. Comfortable. Politically neutral.

By then, all references to The Little Black Boy in promotional material had well and truly gone and the only evidence of him was his presence in High Street. It was a simple case of, if we close our eyes maybe he might go away.

Looking back now, I can understand why. History has a habit of making us uncomfortable. Sometimes that’s because we’ve learnt more. Sometimes it’s because society has changed. And sometimes it’s because we’ve inherited stories without ever really stopping to ask where they came from.

That, more than anything else, is what drew me down the rabbit hole.

So anyway, the name Jocko Graves fascinated me. Where had it come from? Who was he? Had he even existed? Or was this one of those stories that somehow becomes more interesting every time it’s told? The more I dug, the more questions I had, which probably explains why I ended up spending far too much time researching a little statue standing on a street corner.

Looking back now, I can honestly laugh at myself. Most people spend months researching family history or tracing their ancestry. I disappeared down a rabbit hole chasing the life story of a man who may not have even existed.

Normal people probably don’t do that.

Then again… I’ve never claimed to be normal.

Far from it.

That research eventually turned into an article called What Happened To Maitland’s Jocko Graves? The whole idea was simple. I wanted readers to think Jocko was a real resident of Maitland. Someone who’d witnessed the floods, watched Les Darcy rise through the ranks, welcomed royalty and quietly become part of the city’s history. Only later did I reveal that the person I’d been talking about all along was the little fellow standing in High Street.

It was written in the form of a mystery, a drama, a biography of a Maitland resident. It was never meant to be a history lesson. Like most of my writing and “wisdom”, it was meant to make people curious.

Apparently it worked.

The article found its way into Interpreted Wisdom, later became a short film with the assistance of Maitland Regional Art Gallery and was eventually republished by The Maitland Mercury as a weekend feature.

Then, just as quickly as it all happened…Life happened.

We moved on, nothing was ever mentioned again… I got fat, and my hair fell out.

The book sat on a shelf collecting dust and, to be honest, I assumed Jocko had quietly gone back to doing what he’d always done…

Standing there….Watching Maitland go by…..…Until recently.

Now everybody has an opinion. Some people want him removed. Others think he should stay exactly where he is. Some call him an important piece of local history. Others see nothing more than a racist lawn jockey.

It’s amazing really. For well over a hundred years he hardly caused a ripple.

Now he’s front-page news.

But, if I’m honest, a little part of me smiles every time I hear someone casually refer to him as Jocko.

Not because I’m trying to claim ownership over the name. I didn’t invent it, and I’ve never claimed I did. The legend existed long before I ever stumbled across it.

But I genuinely believe I helped bring that name back into the modern Maitland conversation.

It certainly sounds better than “Maitland’s Little Icon”.

Notice I said… I believe.

There’s a reason for that.

After almost twenty years of looking, I’ve never found an earlier published Maitland article that consistently referred to our statue as Jocko Graves before mine. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. It simply means I haven’t found it.

If someone has… I’d love to see it. Seriously.

History deserves to be accurate, not protected by ego.

Mind you…I’d be lying if I said my ego didn’t get a little bruised watching the current debate unfold without anyone saying, “Hang on… wasn’t there a bloke writing about this years ago?”

That’s human nature, I suppose.

I think every creative person wants the same thing, Not fame, just good old-fashioned acknowledgement. There’s a difference.

Back when I was writing Interpreted Wisdom I copped a bit of stick. Friends thought I was wasting my time. Family wondered why I spent so many hours chasing ideas that probably weren’t going to make me a dollar. Jocko was just another one of Brendan’s strange little projects.

Maybe they were right, but at the time it was simply my latest obsession. Writing little blogs was creative, and it was a quick way to get a little ditty out.

The funny thing is, twenty years later, the whole town seems to be having the conversation I was having back then. I wonder what else will come up down the track. Maybe the joys of an ear massage or The Art of the Fart.

Life has a strange sense of humour.

Which brings me to the question everybody seems to be asking…

The million-dollar question that a few people around me would love answered by the guy who wrote that article.

Is Jocko racist?

And honestly…

I don’t think the answer is anywhere near as simple as people would like it to be.

And please forgive the car salesman or politician’sanswer…But bear with me.

I’ve read enough over the years to know there are some genuinely ugly examples of lawn jockeys in American history. Some are obvious racial caricatures and deserve every uncomfortable conversation they generate.

But I’ve also learnt that history has a nasty habit of refusing to fit neatly into modern labels.

The Jocko Graves legend itself is a perfect example. Some historians dismiss it entirely, while others think parts of it may have some truth.

Some believe lawn jockeys were used as symbols on the Underground Railroad.

Others say that’s folklore.

So who’s right?

I honestly don’t know and, most likely, nobody knows for sure.

But here’s what I do know.

The little bloke standing in Maitland isn’t just another lawn jockey sitting in someone’s front yard in America.

He’s something else. He’s become ours.

One thing to think about with his story (that echoes a lot of new Australians to this country) is that, in a strange way, Jocko was an immigrant as well. He arrived in Maitland carrying the baggage of another country’s history, another country’s culture and another country’s controversies.

But over time, something changed.

Maitland didn’t simply inherit him; it adopted him.

Generation after generation grew up with him standing quietly on the corner until, whether intentionally or not, he became part of our own story rather than somebody else’s.

It made me wonder whether we sometimes judge history the same way we judge people.

Most of us wouldn’t judge someone solely because of where they were born or because a distant relative did something terrible. We judge them on their own character, their own actions and the life they’ve lived.

History can be a little like that too.

Just because there are ugly examples elsewhere doesn’t necessarily mean every example should be viewed through exactly the same lens.

Every story deserves to be judged on its own merits.

Generations of kids have met him. Visitors photographed him. Businesses used him. The town adopted him. God forbid, he was the poster child for council letterheads and tourism brochures for decades. A lot of people assumed he was an Aboriginal Australian and not an American slave.

Whether that makes people uncomfortable today is a conversation worth having.

But I also think it’s worth remembering that objects, just like people, often become something their creators never imagined.

Australia has never been short of symbols with complicated histories.

Ask ten Australians about Ned Kelly and you’ll probably get ten different answers.

To some he’s a ruthless murderer.

To others he’s the ultimate symbol of standing up to authority.

William Wallace has become the face of Scottish freedom, yet historians still debate where the real man ends and the legend begins.

Even our own Waltzing Matilda, affectionately called Australia’s unofficial national anthem, tells the story of a swagman who steals a sheep before choosing death rather than surrendering to the authorities.

History has always been untidy.

Folklore has always polished the rough edges.

Maybe “our” Jocko belongs somewhere in that same conversation.

That’s why I still like the story—not because I know all the answers, but because I don’t.

If anything, I’ve got more questions today than I did twenty years ago.

Perhaps that’s always been the point of my writing.

I’ve never been interested in telling people what to think.

I simply enjoy asking questions, making observations and occasionally pointing out life’s little ironies.

Not in a finger-pointing way—just in a “Did you ever think about it like this?” kind of way.

That’s the real value of history.

Not that it always gives us certainty, but that it keeps us asking questions, encourages us to seek answers and, hopefully, helps us become a little wiser by learning from the mistakes of the past.

And that’s the irony in all of this.

For years we hardly spoke about Jocko at all.

Now we’re speaking about him more than ever, just for very different reasons.

Perhaps that’s what history does, It doesn’t stay still.

Every generation looks back through a different lens, asks different questions and sometimes arrives at different answers.

But that raises another question.

Where do we draw the line?

If we start removing every reminder of a flawed past, are we preserving history… or editing it?

That doesn’t mean we ignore the uncomfortable parts of our past.

If anything, it means we should understand them even better.

As the philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Yeah, I know… it’s been quoted to death, but hey, if it’s good enough for him…

Perhaps that only works if we allow ourselves to remember it in the first place.

Carl Sagan once said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

I’m not asking anyone to love Jocko.

I’m not asking anyone to hate him either.

I’m simply suggesting that before we decide what should happen to him, we owe it to ourselves to understand how he came to stand on that corner, what he meant to generations of Maitlanders and why people are still arguing about him all these years later.

We need to judge Jocko on his own merits, not on those of his distant cousins in the United States.

Because once we start deciding which parts of history are acceptable enough to keep… who gets to decide where that line is drawn?

Twenty years ago I wrote an article asking…

What Happened to Maitland’s Jocko Graves?

Today… everybody seems to know his name.

Whether I had anything to do with that…

I’ll leave that for history to decide.

Footnote

Prefer to watch instead?

The original short film, based on my 2006 article ‘What Happened to Maitland’s Jocko Graves?’, was produced with the assistance of Maitland Regional Art Gallery and is still available to watch free on YouTube: