Many cultures express the desire for ideal states of being. Western cultures repeatedly express a search for the ideal through religious belief in notions of paradise, through metaphysical and geographical exploration and in scientific discovery. The notion of paradise is a constant literary theme, from Milton's Paradise Lost, to the Shangri-la of James Hilton's Lost Horizon. Misplaced Memories in Moments of Being tells the stories of ordinary people who like others in their millions wished for better lives in a suburban paradise of their making as they embraced a faith in growth that offered the promise of unending progress.
The book's subject is the search for a new suburban ideal by a post World War Two generation and their children, and the gradual disintegration of the paradise they had built. It is a series of linked short stories about the lives of family members and friends from the 1930s to the year 2001. The book begins with their lives during the immediate post-war years in inner-city Melbourne then follows their move to the last street in the new expanding suburban metropolis to seek a better life. Great events form a background to the stories of individual lives which become part of an epic of the ordinary.
Themes of childhood independence, the struggles of young wives and the dominance of husbands are explored in households united in the belief that progress involves inevitable improvement. But family conflict is hidden behind scenes of normality, and growing personal disillusionment is part of a broader realization that individual lives and the world are worsening.
The community examined in the stories inhabits a group of homes constructed for World War Two ex-servicemen and their families on the edges of an expanding Melbourne. This could be any one of many such communities in many cities. Wartime experiences of both the men and women form the background to the stories of personal conflict and the search for identity, meaning and better lives. The emergence of the Vietnam war challenges the confidence in gradual improvement and heightens the questioning of what war has meant to society. This challenge leads to a questioning of traditional beliefs about warfare and the direction of social trends.
The theme of gradual deterioration is explored further through the assault on nature and the disillusionment from the discovery that the search for progress leads to the inevitable destruction of paradise. The twin themes of an idealistic belief in nature and the human passion for progress are explored in suburban and rural contexts and in times of war eventually ending in cataclysm.
The book's literary form follows a pattern of repetition and variation where characters move in and out of linked stories allowing the development of personalities and explanations of events. The stories move back and forward in time to explain, in particular, the nature and role of memory in time. Characters, themes, events and images constantly reappear and are varied to allow the development of the narrative.
