In 1878 construction began at Port Augusta on the Great Northern Railway, a lightly built line that many South Australians imagined as the first leg of a grand transcontinental route all the way to Darwin. Mineral finds in the Flinders Ranges and a run of unusually good rainfall in the Far North had convinced settlers and politicians alike that the dry interior could be tamed. The rails crept north - reaching Quorn in 1879, Hawker in 1880, Beltana in 1881 - and finally arrived at Government Gums, soon to be Farina, in 1882. The Governor of South Australia, Sir William Jervois, declared the line open on 22 May 1882. For two years Farina was the railhead, the bustling end of steel, until the track pushed on to Marree in 1884 and the town became merely a stop along the way.

The renaming was an act of pure hope. Australia's interior had fooled people before with a few wet seasons, and Farina was founded on the belief that the good rains would hold. They did not. The wheat the town's name promised simply would not grow in country this arid, and the dream of a northern grain belt withered. The railway still earned its keep hauling what the land could actually produce - sheep, wool and cattle moved south along the line - but the crops that were meant to justify the whole enterprise never materialised. Farina would always be a place defined as much by what failed to happen as by what did.

At its height Farina was a real town - close to 600 people, two hotels, a school, a church, breweries, and a bakery cut into the ground to beat the desert heat. But a settlement in marginal country needs its railway, and when the narrow-gauge line was finally closed in 1981, Farina's last reason for being went with it. The standard-gauge line that had run alongside it since 1957 carried its final traffic in 2019. The cemetery had stopped taking burials decades earlier. One by one the buildings fell to ruin, the roofs collapsing, the walls slumping back toward the red earth - until Farina was, by every measure, a ghost town.

Then the volunteers came. Since 2008 the Farina Restoration Group has drawn people from across Australia, who give up weeks at a time to stabilise the ruins and bring fragments of the town back to life. Their finest trick is the underground bakery - a stone Scotch oven dug in beneath the desert in the 1800s, and now, remarkably, working again. For a few short weeks each winter the volunteers fire it up and bake fresh bread and pies in the middle of nowhere, the smell of baking drifting out over a town that is mostly rubble and memory. The profits go straight back into the restoration. At the old railway precinct, the group has worked to honour the line that built and then abandoned the place, gathering the relics of an outback railway that aimed for Darwin and stopped, for a while, right here.