Australasian Drama Studies 52 (April 2008) Mis-recognised Knowledges: National Identity and the Unreliable Narrator in Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination and Josephine Wilson’s The Geography of Haunted Places Glen McGillivray They’ve [the monodramas] homed in on the actor–audience relationship, and in some of them you have the character acting out what is perhaps a moving or tragic moment, then the actor will chop that off and say to the audience ‘that’s called acting.’ So you’re leading the audience one way and cutting them off, and there is often a delicate balance in terms of the audience whether or not a certain speech is actually very moving or is not meant to be moving – perhaps it is tongue in cheek. So you’re playing with very serious emotions in a kind of ironic way. 1 wo single figures, and two voices separated by twenty-five years, speak to an ‘Australian identity’ that has become increasingly conflicted over the years. Jack Hibberd’s misanthropic Monk O’Neill – old, spent, twisted – embodies a series of Australian archetypes that are grotesquely subverted by the context of their enunciation. Similarly, Josephine Wilson’s Miss Discovery articulates national discourses of the body, of ownership and legitimacy and the anxieties of Anglo-Celtic Australia. In this article I analyse how both works, despite their different historical contexts, enact a critique of Australian identity against a background of significant political change within the country. Although seemingly quite different, these works adopt similar dramaturgical strategies and I argue that their significance lies in their genealogical connection. By this I am not suggesting a direct line-of- descent from Hibberd to Wilson and her collaborators; rather, it is through the congruency of certain ideas of national identity, expressed in these works, that the genealogy becomes apparent. The dramaturgies of A Stretch of the Imagination and The Geography of Haunted Places utilise a radical disjunction between ostensible subject positions – for example, the pioneer or the beauty queen – and the subversion of those positions in performance. This is the ‘chopping off’ Hibberd refers T