The Ruins of "Farina"

Had a quite day catching our breath, Helen & Daryl arrived from Burra about 3pm. I cooked a beef stew in the camp oven, in the communal kitchen in the park. After tea we had coffee around the camp fire and a young couple, Mitch and Ashlee came and sat with us to have a chat. They are travelling until they find somewhere they both would like to live.
We have just left Leigh Creek, driving north towards Marree, when we came across these ruins of this old town, called “Farina”. All across the South Australian desert area there are hundreds of these types of ruins. Where people have come out here to settle and do farming with either crops sheep or some cattle, and with the ‘fickle’ weather, even back then (1800s) found it all just too hard and they had to walk off their properties and go elsewhere. These once lovely old stone homes just left to erode away in the elements. “Farina” on the other hand was a small town; this is the "Underground Bakery" that is still standing...

On our travels along the Oodnadatta Track, we found a paddock of Metal Sculptured Art (ART???). They have been made of scrap metal of all kinds. An artist, Robin Cook from Melbourne comes out here nearly every year to make more pieces and/or fix up the broken pieces. He has used bits of metal from the railway and old cars, machinery etc. Quite amazing, and is right at home in this barrens landscape. We had some lunch there... cold silverside sandwiches and a cup of tea.

At Mound Springs Conservation Park, we stopped to have a look at the “Blanche Cup” and the “Bubbler” springs. The “Bubbler” was a bit scary, because it just looked like it was bubbling mud from the underground. This is where the aboriginal pulled a huge snake out of the ground, cooked the bloody big fella in the Blanche Cup, eat the snake and the throw its head away, and where it landed became another spring; – so the legend goes. The area all around the Bubbler spring is covered with these active mounds, which have huge area of crusted mineral salt deposits from the water bubbling up from the Artesian Basin.