Farina: The Ghost Town That Stops People in Their Tracks

There are a few stops on the journey to Lake Eyre that I never get tired of, regardless of how many times I’ve been there. Farina is one of them.

It sits off the Oodnadatta Track, north of Lyndhurst and south of Marree. It’s not the kind of place you’d know to look for if no one told you about it. But when you get there — particularly in the early morning light, when the ruins are throwing long shadows across the red earth and no one else is around — it gets into you.

What Farina Was

Farina was established in 1878 with considerable optimism. The South Australian government had been pushing settlement north along the railways, and Farina was laid out as a proper town — surveyed streets, land allotments, the expectation of agriculture in country that turned out to be too dry for it.

At its peak, Farina had a pub, a bakery, a school, several churches, a railway station, and a population of several hundred people. It was genuinely alive. Then the droughts came, the railway priorities shifted, and the town declined steadily through the early twentieth century. By the 1960s it was effectively abandoned.

What’s Left

What you see at Farina now are the ruins of all of this. Stone walls standing to varying heights. The outline of buildings long since roofless. A cemetery that volunteers from the Friends of Farina group have been carefully restoring. An underground bakery that has been excavated and partially reconstructed by the same group.

The underground bakery is the most intact structure — the low earth temperature kept the space preserved better than the above-ground buildings. You can walk into it, see the bread oven, and get a direct sense of what the working interior of a nineteenth century outback bakery looked like. It’s one of those moments where history stops being abstract.

The Friends of Farina

The restoration work happening at Farina is done by volunteers who camp there each year and spend weeks carefully stabilising walls, clearing sites, and maintaining what’s left. They’ve done remarkable work. The ruins are more legible and more evocative now than they would be if left to deteriorate further, and the interpretive signage they’ve installed gives context that makes the visit much richer.

Worth knowing: the site operates on a honesty-box entry system to support the restoration work. We encourage our groups to contribute.

On Our Tours

We stop at Farina on day two of both the four and five day Lake Eyre tours. The timing usually puts us there in the morning, which is the best light for photography and the best temperature for walking around the ruins. It’s one of the stops where people consistently want more time than the schedule allows — a good sign.