Ian Warden | Can you take a city's expression at face value?

Canberrans, do you see such a thing as a typical, a representative Canberra expression on Canberra faces?

Yanis Varoufakis, the refreshingly leftish Greek economist, politician, writer and thinker, has just (on February 14) appeared on ABC Radio National's refreshingly leftish Late Night Live.

He is just returned from embargoes-impoverished Cuba and for LNL, compared the faces of the people of Havana with the faces of his Athens.

For him the faces of the people of today's Athens show Athenians looking "mostly dispossessed and humiliated" while "on the faces of people in Havana I saw pride, I saw smiles".

Varoufakis gave economic, sociological and political reasons for why he thinks the people of these two cities are wearing such different faces. We have no room here to go into his sorts of details (you can find it all online via LNL) but find intriguing the thought that a city might wear its heart, its state of mind, on its citizens' faces.

If Varoufakis is right about this (and many thinkers and writers before him, including our very own Henry Lawson, have thought it is the case) then the thinking citizen, alerted by Varouflakis' big idea, suddenly becomes much more face conscious.

A long-time student of my city's nature, of its moods and caprices, I have, prompted by Varouflakis, begun peering intently into its people's faces.

To digress only a little for only a moment, last Saturday at the Australian National Gallery's fabulous Cressida Campbell exhibition, I peered intently into the scowling teenage face of a 1988 Campbell self-portrait.

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"What are you staring at, grandad? Go away and leave me alone!" her glowering face seemed to seethe, in truth seething something f-bombishly far less polite than "Go away".

Dutifully I shuffled away out of reach of the flame-haired adolescent's crankiness but while thinking appreciatively of the self-honesty of those artists prepared (unlike the 99.9 per cent of humanity taking flattering selfies) to capture their growling, glowering sides.

But back to my research, still only a work in progress, into the Canberra face. My work may find nothing definitive, but then may find a NIMBY, bourgeois, first-world, fat cat, EV-driving smugness there on the well-nourished federal capital face. We shall see.

For homework for my research in this field I have re-read Henry Lawson's militantly humane 1903 poem, Faces In The Street.

The mighty poem is Lawson's shocked eye-witness reporting of Sydney's oppressed working classes on their early-morning trudges to their days of soul-destroying wage slavery.

And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair,

To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care;

I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet

In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street ...

The wan and weary faces first begin to trickle by,

Increasing as the moments hurry on with morning feet,

Till like a pallid river flow the faces in the street ...

Canberra seems set to soon have a Canberra Poet Laureate and one wonders what she will make of Canberra's faces. One looks forward to her Faces On The Tram, her contemporary, Canberra version of Lawson's Faces In The Street.

But she and other students of the human face (students such as Varoufakis and Lawson) will need to be wary of what they think they see. What they read into what the 42 facial muscles and the six classic basic human emotions (anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness) seem together to be expressing on a face may be wrong.

Exciting new research just published by the universities of Glasgow and Amsterdam shows that the ways in which we interpret facial expressions can be highly subjective. The same facial expression may, say, suggest disgust to me but something quite different to thou.

So what if what Lawson thought he saw "stamped" on Sydney's working-class faces was a subjective figment of his revolutionary, Marxist imagination?

What if then (and I want to believe this) what I mistook for Cressida Campbell's face's fuming "Eff off, grandad!" was in truth her "Thank you, mature-age connoisseur of the arts, for your keen interest in the fascinating genre (of which, as you well know, Rembrandt is the towering figure) of the ruthlessly unflattering self-portrait".

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