The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

The House With a Thousand Stairs
BY Garrick Jones
MoshPit Publishing, 2020
Five stars

Garrick Jones has made me fall in love with Australia—a place I may or may not ever see. His marvelous “Australia’s Son” took me to late Victorian Sydney by way of a murder mystery that pulled a famous opera singer into a maelstrom of confusion and danger. “The House With a Thousand Stairs” jumps a half-century later, into the outback of New South Wales in the aftermath of World War II. It is brilliant and emotionally overwhelming at times, a love song for rural Australia and its big-hearted people.

The book opens with Peter Dixon, sitting on the dusty verandah of his family’s abandoned and shuttered house at Waarambool Station, which was his parents’ sheep ranch (an American term—not used in Australia). It is a scene of sadness and defeat, expressing Peter’s despair at the losses he has suffered, not only in the war, but back at home, where the life he remembers seems to have died.

This is the story of Waarambool (the Kamilaroi word for Milky Way) gradually coming back to life, and with it the revitalization of Peter’s own existence. The three main ingredients in this remarkably rich narrative are the land, the animals, and the people. With a scarred body and a broken heart, Peter turns to the land first for comfort, trying to salvage what is left of the beautiful house and landscape of his memories. Then his neighbors—people from the neighboring properties and town, who knew him as a boy and loved his parents—begin to appear, offering welcome and assistance. Then he discovers that Frank Hunter is back in town, working as a constable. Frank was his closest friend as a child, the son of a white sheep rancher and his Aboriginal common-law wife. Frank was separated from Peter when his mother’s people, the Kamilaroi, left their ancestral land, driven away by white violence and colonization. As Peter reestablishes his relationships with the people of his hometown, he and Frank begin to reconnect with the love they shared in childhood.

The animals—both farm and wild—play both metaphoric and real-life roles in this drama, bringing the land alive in a way that people alone cannot. People Peter remembers from his past life matter—but so do people he met during his years away at war. Frank is singular in his importance to Peter, and their story as lifelong friends and ultimately as a couple winds its way throughout the book. The deeply rooted cultural racism in Australia—chillingly parallel to America’s mistreatment of both Native Americans and enslaved Africans—it a constant theme, linked to Peter’s sexuality, thus making him an outcast of sorts as well.

Oddly, this is not a romantic book so much as an emotionally powerful book, the warm uplift of the narrative arc spiked with moments, usually from the past, of horrific brutality. There is lots of love here—people loving other people simply because they need it to heal their wounds, physical and psychological. The author’s deft way with story-telling allows him to bring quite contemporary notions of justice and compassion into the 1940s setting without any sense of anachronism. The World War has pulled the scales from the eyes of the people who suffered through it. It not only works, but it helps drive the narrative forward in a way that has the pull of inevitability.

A beautiful paean to the goodness of humanity, this book is a gift at a time when many of us—especially Americans—need one.