Ian Warden: When mortals' legs turn to jelly

- Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, 1964

Glowering, ferocious faces! Bulging, rolling eyes! Bared, flashing teeth! Intimidating stares! Action-electrified hair standing up crazily on heads!

No, this is not a description of the faces of highly competitive players in action in the FIFA Women's World Cup. It's a description of some female faces in the National Museum of Australia's exhibition Feared+ Revered - Feminine Power Through The Ages.

But wait! In fact there is some considerable overlapping here. With the nation lately revering the Matildas and thinking of them as goddesses, I knew it was time to sally forth at last to the Feared+Revered exhibition.

The exhibition, featuring mighty possessions of the British Museum, lots of them effigies and images of mighty goddesses, is in its twilight days.

I knew it was "Matildas Mania" (The Canberra Times has been calling it that) and the feminist voltage that mania has been imparting to Australian life that at last got my toes twinkling along to the exhibition.

In the matter of faces, there is still some novelty, some sexist surprise, in ogling female faces expressing far more than our sexist stereotyping of what women's faces ought to advertise.

We are conditioned to expect the "feminine" face to be reassuringly docile, demure, girly, maternal or decorative. Barbie's face (all frivolous girly bliss and docility) and the face of the serene and fulfilled Virgin (with Jesus on her lap) in her portrayals by the old masters, have been very influential in this.

The contrary (contrary to stereotypes) female facial expressions of the goddesses, demons and witches of the Feared+Revered exhibition and of the fiercely footballing women of this World Cup are exciting in the extreme.

I mean no disrespect to the statuesque (1.87-metre-tall) French central defender Wendie Renard (I respect her enormously) when I say that a statue of her, wearing her fearsome footballing glower, would fit seamlessly in among the sometimes literally statuesque women of Feared+Revered.

She would rub shoulders appropriately and especially with the statue (carved from a spectacularly speckled and sparkling stone called granodiorite) of the fearsome, lion-headed Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. One has seen her leonine face and body-language on the field a thousand times during this World Cup.

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The exhibitions' Kali The Terrible (a Hindu deity associated with time, doomsday, and death) wearing a garland of her victims' freshly-severed heads, leaves a lasting nightmarsh impression.

So too does Rangda the terrifying Balinese Demon-Queen general of an army of evil-loving witches, her eyes a'bulge with malice and her gnashing teeth all the better to tear us apart with.

The exhibition's Lilith (for some, the sexually and intellectually assertive first wife of Adam and that poor weak man's superior in every way) stared haughtily at me in a way that has left me feeling as small and worm-like as Adam must have felt in her awesome company.

As it happens, players' faces, homed-in on again and again, and filling the screen, every pore, every sweatdrop, every grimace of exertion, pain and aggression displayed, have been a huge, dramatic feature of TV coverage of this Women's World Cup.

In my fever I took a subscription to enable me to see every match played. Those directing the cameras of the paid-for TV coverage have been showing some flair in this. Sometimes, watching these World Cup matches has been like being at a portrait gallery of portraits of a special race of humans doing extraordinary things.

The national "Matildas Madness" (the media have been calling it that too) has been so unusual and so very hard to explain that we should try some imaginative theorising about it.

One possibility is that this national "madness" has been an expression of sanity. What if our nation has a craving, largely subconscious and hardly ever expressed (except in virtuosic columns like this one) for female idols and role models? It may be that the Matildas have been filling a void, doing the nation some psychotherapeutic good.

We have so very few towering female examples to us in the normal course of Australian public life because ours has for so long been stony, sexist soil in which women and girls have found it hard to flourish and blossom. Certainly we almost never find worthwhile female idols in Australian political life.

Sociopathic sexist pig bullies hounded our first female prime minister out of office. How disturbing, how freakish, how "unladylike" (with nothing of Barbie or of the Virgin Mary about her) Julia Gillard seemed to her hounders-in-chief, to sexist swine like Tony Abbott wanting women to know and to stay in their proper places.

A more grown-up nation (but how engagingly, pre-pubescently child-like our dear nation can seem and has seemed during this World Cup!) should perhaps take a manic delight in, feel feverish about its best female writers, scientists and composers.

But the Matildas, so athletically noble and always trying their hearts out, have been well worth our rapt adoration. How goddess-like the Matildas seemed, for example, in the penalty shoot-out (20 penalty kicks!), their legs staying superhumanly strong and steady in ultra-anxious circumstances where most mortal Australian legs would turn to (Aeroplane-brand) jelly.

And so meanwhile, as Donald Horne diagnosed so long ago, for us sport is brightly sunlit (often floodlit, in worshipper-packed stadiums). Life, and the rest, is shadow.

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