The 2012 season was my first visit to Farina. I travelled up with our iconic baker Martin MacLennan, Dave and Ian in Martin’s 4WD.

As a photographer, I wanted to try to capture the spirit of this remote settlement, and to document both the people involved in this mammoth task, and the progression of the “restoration” of the remaining buildings.

Since Martin had first rights in use of his vehicle, I was, to a large extent relegated to “Shanks’s Pony”, carrying quite heavy gear around in the midday heat. Most days I was up at dawn, as in photography, lighting is (almost) everything, and I wanted to capture the dignified majesty of these fast disappearing ruins.

Like most people who visit the ruins (or look at images displayed on this site), the big question that bugged me was “why were there so few remains of the old town, and why had the remaining stone structures degraded so quickly”?

Some of this question was answered when I talked to others on site. A huge factor in the degradation turned out to be due to the remoteness of the locatiion.

Farina is basically positioned on flat gibber plain where stones aren’t much larger than marbles, so all building stones had to be trucked in. I assumed that this meant from “down South”, but it may have come from the Witchelina Station area to the North-West. Sand and lime were not available locally. There were no limestone deposits, and even if there were, insufficient timber to run a kiln to produce the lime necessary for mortar production.

So – with lime so expensive after trucking from “down South”, an alternative product had to be found. There was plenty of mud in the creek (when it ran), and not much rain to wash it away, so stone walls were made using a mud mortar, skinned inside and out with the more expensive lime mortar.

This was fine as long as the roofs covered the tops of the walls. As soon as a roof was blown off (in a wind-storm), or termites rotted the roof timbers, rain (when it came) soaked into the tops of the walls, soaking down in behind the lime mortar skin, and the walls fell down!

Not only the walls were doomed, but because the town was built on, or near huge salt lakes, the wind carried small amounts of salt particles which eventually landed on any steel object (roofing nails, hinges, rail etc.), and they also rotted away. So we had water in the mortar, white ants in the wood, and salt in the steel, all conspiring to demolish the town.