Jodus Madrid has lived many lives: youth worker, performer, filmmaker, community advocate. But if you ask him what truly shaped the man he is, his answer always circles backto one person:
His father. Jimmy Madrid. A man also of many lives.
Today, Jodus works as a cultural educator, sharing knowledge about Aboriginal history, identity and survival with students and institutions. His path there wasn’t straight.
Raised in New South Wales, he eventually moved to South Australia, searching for both opportunity and reinvention. He studied archaeology, anthropology and history at Flinders University, stepping deeper into the long continuum of story that Aboriginal people have always carried.
But long before lecture rooms and cultural programs, Jodus learned about history the oldway. Lived experience, yarns, and watching the strength of the man who raised him. Jodus’s father was born into a world that was already stacked against him.
He grew up on a reserve outside Tingha in New South Wales, one of those places deliberately positioned “one mile out of town, out of sight, out of mind.” His older siblings had already left by the time welfare authorities began circling again. When word came that officials were coming, the family fled to Sydney.
Not long after, tragedy struck in a way that would fracture the rest of his life.
As a youngboy, Jimmy watched a neighbour throw a rock at his mother during an argument. She was hit in the head and died from a brain haemorrhage. Authorities arrived, and instead of being allowed support from family, Jimmy was taken away. He was just seven years old when he was placed in the Mittagong Boys’ Home. He would remain institutionalised until he was fourteen.
When the family finally tracked him down, his older brother, a travelling tent boxer, pulled him out. But freedom came with another kind of hardship. Six months later, Jimmy was fighting grown men for money in boxing tents that toured rural Australia.
“He fought thousands of fights,” Jodus says. “Sometimes five or six blokes a day.”
Jimmy kept adiary, trying to document the sheer number of bouts. It was a number so high heonce approached the Guinness Book of Records. But like many Aboriginal stories, there was no official record, no recognition. Just memory. Just survival.
As a young man, Jimmy was later conscripted to serve in Vietnam. But he began noticingsomething disturbing: many Aboriginal soldiers were being sent into the most dangerous areas and not coming back.
So he ran. He went AWOL, changed his name after seeing “Madrid” in a newspaper, and was eventuallyimprisoned by the military. When the Whitlam government came to power, political prisoners were released, and he walked free, keeping the name that he had chosen for himself.
For Jodus, that name means everything. “It’s not a coloniser name,” he says. “He chose it. It came from resistance.”
After the army, Jimmy channelled his toughness into discipline. Within a few years, he became Australia’s first Aboriginal first-dan black belt in taekwondo. Over decades, he rose to seventh dan master level, travelling to Korea to grade and fight for advancement.
But his greatest legacy wasn’t in trophies or titles. It was in stories.
“He could remember dates, places, rounds, whom he fought,” Jodus says. “As a kid, I got sick of hearing the same yarns. Now I’m grateful. Because they’re mine tocarry.”
But now, as Jimmy’s health declines, those memories began slipping away. Diagnosed with vascular dementia, likely linked to decades of head trauma, the man who once remembered every fight now struggles to recall yesterday. “I realised those stories live with me now,” Jodus says. “That’s responsibility.”
In recent years, Jimmy’s health deteriorated sharply. Home care support proved inadequate. He was found seriously ill and neglected, leading tohospitalisation and permanent placement in aged care. Not long after, his home was destroyed by fire, and many personal belongings, including scripts, keepsakes, and documents, were lost.
For Jodus, navigating aged care systems, medical bureaucracy, and long-distance advocacy has been exhausting and heartbreaking. “It feels like I’m making the decisions he once made for me,” he says. “Only now I’m trying to protect him.”
Despite everything, Jodus continues his own work, in classrooms and in community programs, and recently picked up acting again in a short film. Because he knows firsthandwhat happens when stories are lost.
Now, he is the one repeating the stories. Not just for his children, not just for the community, but for a father whose life was shaped by removal, violence, resilience, and a refusal to disappear.
And in telling those stories, Jodus is doing what Aboriginal families have always done: picking up the pieces, carrying them forward, and making sure the next generation knows exactly where they come from.
“My old people told things over and over,” he says. “So, when hard times came, you already knew how to survive.”
Jodus's current focus is working to relocate his father closer to him, from NSW to SA, so he can ensure his final years are spent with dignity, safety and family. He recently created a GoFundMe to help with transportation and housing.
To help,visit: Help Aboriginal Elder Jim Madrid Rebuild