Farina.
A pastoral lease was taken up here in 1859 by George Davenport of Macclesfield and Beaumont and William Fowler. It was along the Leigh Creek (which flows occasionally into Lake Eyre) and the area was known as Government Gums. A town site was surveyed here in 1876 near the water reserve but no farming lands were ever surveyed. The town was declared in 1878 at the same time as the government was planning the northern railway and settlers arrived late that year. Although this region was far beyond Goyder’s Line (its northern limit was Orroroo – 316 kms to the south) Governor Jervois in his wisdom named the town Farina from a Latin word for flour. The grain paddocks never eventuated but a thriving town emerged based on the railway, supplies to the sheep and cattle stations, mail routes to properties along the Birdsville and Strzelecki tracks and occasional mining in the Flinders and Gammon Ranges. The government was so optimistic about the future of this area that they laid out a town with a north, south, east and west terraces with 432 town blocks and 88 suburban blocks with small acreages. Although the first buildings were in timber or canvas stone structures soon followed with the foundation stone of the Transcontinental Hotel laid by a local Aboriginal woman on 5 June 1878. The hotel was licensed in 1879 as was the second hotel in town the Exchange Hotel. The railway was pushed up through Pichi Richi Pass to Quorn and Hawker in 1878 and extended to Farina in 1882. Chinese men were employed on building the railway and some settled in the town. Farina was the rail head from 1882 -1884 when the line went to Marree.
The town boomed in the 1880s. It soon had 100 adults and 50 children. The galvanised iron government school opened by 1882. Almost from its inception the town had two general stores, a couple of short lived breweries (within the two hotels), saddler, blacksmiths and underground bakery. Dozens of camel trains lined the streets loading goods for outlying stations. By 1886 Farina had 300 residents, about 30 houses an Anglican (wooden) church and 8 teamsters. Before 1900 it had a stone Police Station, a stone Post Office and telegraph station, and an enlarged school and the Catholics were raising funds to erect a Catholic which occured in 1897 and removed to Murraytown in 1937. After 1900 the town began to decline as the rail head was pushed beyond Marree to Oodnadatta by 1891 but it remained the staging post for camel trains to outback stations. Railway cottages were built for workers stationed in the town and an “Afghan town” emerged about a mile from the town. It was where all the Afghan cameleers lived with their families. Often they married Aboriginal women as their choices were limited at that time. But some of the Afghans (and some Chinese) were known to attend Methodist Church services well into the 20th century. As the population declined the churches suffered. By 1912 the Methodist Church seems to have closed and Methodist services were held in the assembly room of one of the hotels. Who said Methodists never went into hotels? The wooden Anglican Church survived for many years into the 1930s. A newspaper in 1928 noted that Farina had two churches, 50 children at the school, 50 houses, 73 adults on the electoral roll and a hotel.
The declining town was besieged literally by sand in the mid-1930s although at that time the train service was as strong as ever. The Commonwealth Railways took over the line from Marree to Oodnadatta from the SA government in 1911 with a promise to extend it all the way to Darwin. The Commonwealth reneged on that promise but they did build the line to Alice Springs between 1926 and 1929 when the Ghan service began. The harsh environment caught up with the town in 1935. Saint-a-Becket sand hill five mills away was gradually blown towards the town and newspapers reported that locals we paying £10 a year to have sand removed from their properties. The former Exchange Hotel was half covered in sand as the building was stripped of floor boards etc and it closed in 1937. Sand clogged the rail yards. The government commissioned a report by the Soil Erosion Committee. Prolonged drought, overstocking on the outlying pastoral properties and town residents grazing their own goats, camels and donkeys on the outskirts of the town all contributed to the problem. It was proposed to plant non-edible plants to animals and to create a fenced reserve around the town upon which no animals were allowed to graze. This rectified the problem but the town was dying by then anyway. Goats were kept by outback residents as a source of milk before refrigeration rail carriages could deliver milk. They were the forebears of the feral goats throughout the Flinders Ranges today. The camels of the Afghan cameleers were also the forebears of the feral camels that roam northern SA and the NT. A District and Bush Nurses Hospital opened in 1921 in the former Transcontinental Hotel which had closed in 1918. Then the establishment of Leigh Creek and hospital in 1943 reduced the need for a hospital in Farina. The hospital closed in 1945 as it had no staff and it formally closed in 1949. The Police station closed 1951. In 1936 the Farina school had 38 pupils but that declined and the school shut in 1957. The Post Office closed in 1960 as did the cemetery and the last general store closed in 1967. A new railway line was built in standard gauge to the Leigh Creek coalfields in 1956 and it was extended through Farina to Marree in 1957 but it closed too in 1980 when a new railway opened from Tarcoola to Alice Spring. Farina became a ghost town with a handful of residents. The last resident left in 1975. The railway to Farina was torn up in 1993. In 2009 a group of Victorian volunteers began a restoration project in the town on the remaining ten stone buildings. Farina now has secured a role to play in the outback history record of Sth. Australia.
