The Gawler Line Project: North Adelaide

Welcome to the first edition of The Gawler Line Project. This is a personal photojournalism project that I plan to undertake weekly (time permitting). I have been living with my sister for a while and working in the city, and my daily commute now encompasses the train. Trains featured a lot in my life in Europe, but I'd never really caught one in Adelaide. They simply didn't go past my house and I didn't know anyone along the lines.

Now it's a different story - The Gawler Line and I are becoming quite close, so I thought I'd look deeper at her stations and what goes on around them. Train windows are whole new take on the world. You get back fences and industrial yards to peek over and into, and you don't have to stop for anyone. I like that.

North Adelaide
The first stop out of town on the Gawler Line, North Adelaide, sits between the golf course and the suburb of Bowden. Incidently, Bowden is the location of my first home as a child, although I don't remember a lot of it because we moved when I was 2.

I heard from my Uncle who lives down the street from here that there was some kind of homeless person's bookswap under the overpass, so for my first project I went down to take a look. This is supposed to be photojournalism, not actual journalism, so I wont talk about it much. Besides, I don't know much about who started it or who uses it, so let that be a wonderful mystery to solve another day. May I present, the Bowden Bookshelf...

If you're ever walking by, be sure to take any unwanted clothes, books or magazines and drop them off. Someone else could benefit from your unwanted items. Or if you're looking for a new read or some cheaper-than-Op-Shop-chic, give Bowden a try.

Panero: What's in a name?

Sunday 23rd August, 2009

In Paris, many signs in stations are translated into English and Spanish, below the French. But in the Gare Lyon, Italian replaces Spanish. The lines run to the south-east, treni replace trenes, and we were on the 07:42 bound for Turin.

But the real story started long before this moment...

My great-grandfather, Francesco Panero, was born in Italy a long time ago. He came to Australia and married an Australian woman, my great-grandmother Elva, and had one son, Paul, my paternal grandfather. Until recently, this was about all the information we had. Francesco had long since passed away, and Elva had become estranged from the family, tucked away in a little flat not far from where I lived in Adelaide. She hadn’t shared any of our history with us, and passed away last year taking her secrets to the grave.

Naturally we were curious, but my father more than any of us. He started an investigation and eventually found the location of Francesco’s unmarked grave. A lot more paperwork later, he had some birth and marriage certificates, and was beginning to piece together a story. It seemed Francesco had used the name Paneros in Australia, never changing it legally, but it stuck around over the next 3 generations. My primary school put me in Greek classes, thinking I was Greek, until my parents had me changed to the Italian class, which I stuck with until Year 10. Unfortunately, I remember very little of both.

So we knew we were Italian - now we wanted the paperwork to prove it. For one year, back and forth with the Italian Consulate and the City of Fossano, Dad persevered with form after form. Francesco had also used four different first names, which didn’t help. We found out that he’d died from pneumonia, contracted after a car accident. He had arrived in Australia at age 17 with his father Guglielmo, who later returned to Fossano. Eventually, we had enough documentation to prove the lineage, and we were rewarded with Italian citizenship and passports (after paying the right fees, of course). I was able to enter France as an EU citizen, bypassing visas and long immigration lines at the airport. I also get into the Louvre for free – viva la France!

We are the only Paneros family in Australia. As far as I know, we are the only Paneros family in the world. There are none on Skype, and none on Facebook, so that about covers it! I have recently found out that los pañeros in Spanish means "the clothiers", people who make or sell clothing or cloth. But this is not a profession that runs in the family. In fact, Dad’s interest in woodwork may well be in the Panero DNA, as we were to discover.

So that’s the story, which leads us to this point, winding our way down to Turin for the next genealogical chapter.

Tren Italia

I spent a lot of time on trains in Italy. Australia lacks the intricate network of intercity railways that make Europe reasonably accessible, and has no underground systems either. Granted, travel between Perth and Sydney is slightly more than you’d want to spend in a carriage but you get more room than a plane, you arrive right in the centre of town and the rhythmic hum of wheels on tracks is easier to sleep with than the roar of jet engines.

You see more on trains. My notebook is filled with observations – made either gazing out the window or within the carriage itself. Arriving in Milan from the sky, I left for Venice across the land and watched as the city quickly faded to housing and then fields, dotted with industrial blemishes and linked by power lines. On the horizon, darker patches of grey-blue became green as we approached the mountains. Yellow and pink housing blocks were topped with terracotta tiles, and peach-framed windows where enclosed in shutters of burnt sienna. Crumbling bell towers rested on the churches of Rovato, Brescia and Verona while vast lakes became ponds in the past as I approached Venezia St Lucia.


The people on trains are more interesting. Boarding the train in Pisa, I helped a woman get a suitcase on board and was thanked in a thick American accent. Her companions - a group of middle-aged women who smelt incredibly motherly but bore no physical resemblance to my own, got me thinking about my Mum and her sisters to the point where I could imagine one of them licking a hanky and wiping the basil pesto off my chin as I finished my pasta.

Local carabinieri on the train from Florence to Rome gave me no end of entertaining imaginings. Appearing from nowhere, they gave me little time to whip my feet off the seat and appear innocent. But I must have set off their guilty radar as they came back through the carriage and sat in the seats facing mine, rather like an official escort. They sat silent in their blue uniforms, even as I imagined them wearing gladiator costumes, golden helmets with red brooms atop and leather sandals on their feet.

The most senior-looking sat directly across from me. He looked kind - the corners of his mouth were turned up in a little wink of happiness, his eyes mirroring an honest contentment. They darted left to right as he looked out of the window and fell to the floor when we reached each station. His brows narrowed when his colleagues addressed him, more wrinkles forming as he rested his chin on his hand, pushing his cheek up under the weight of his head. His hair was all but gone, keeping only the skin above his ears warm as his day-old beard did for his jaw. His shirt was clean but faded, no doubt carefully pressed and starched a thousand times by housebound wife. He stared out at the vineyards, probably longing for a glass of wine at the end of a day's work. As his head came to his hand again, his eyes closed and he relaxed in the seat, perhaps concluding that I wasn't the trouble-maker he had imagined and he could go back to thinking about tonight's dinner.

I'd heard train travel could be unreliable but had been blessed with an almost perfect departure each journey. That was until my final trip - the night train from Rome to Bari, necessary for a budget flight to Athens. It was scheduled for departure at midnight but that changed to 12.30am and was further delayed until 1am. A friendly American from my hostel kept me safe in the station during those wee hours and despite my worst fears of sharing a booth with the homeless-looking Italian and his German Shepard, I was seated with only one quiet young man who slept the entire journey. We made up time overnight and I rushed from the train to the bus stop and on to the airport, with 20 minutes left to check in.

And so began the next phase in my adventure... Greece.

Train de Nuit

I am getting the train to Paris tomorrow, and back home again at night. Somewhere in my deepest fairytale dreams it will be something like this...


So maybe I'm not going to Istanbul. And I don't get a sleeper cabin. I don't even wear No. 5 but maybe I should?! 

It makes me want to watch Amelie again, then go out and see Coco avant Chanel, which I've been too ashamed to do because of my poor French (and don't even mention subtitles, blasphemy!). Watching the Making Of (and the film in better quality) makes me want to pick up my textbook and absord every last grammatical exercise, every conjugation and vocabularly list, until I can ramble on about the flattery of being somebody's muse in the world's most beautiful advertisement.

So, back to reality. French exam tomorrow and I need to know my pendant from my depuis.