Article
Article
Is this the most remote bakery in Australia?
10 JUL 2026
Deep in the Flinders Ranges, 660km north of Adelaide, lies a ghost town. Farina was largely forgotten by 1967, with just a few residents left. But, for eight weeks of the year, an underground oven fires up - supplying one of Australia’s most remote bakeries. People drive for days just to get a taste.
26 kilometres past the last town, on a small patch of outback South Australia, a dust cloud follows your car as you turn off the main highway in search of Farina. Or the bones of it anyway. Roofless stone ruins rise from the dirt and sandstone walls have been burnt rust-red after more than a century of sun. They've crumbled down to jagged half-heights, framing nothing but blue sky and a horizon that stretches out flat in every direction. Street signs for North Terrace and Twelfth Street stand at the corner of intersections nobody drives anymore. The only movement are the kites circling above, with weeds that are pushing through dirt that used to be floors.
You could almost mistake this for a Mad Max set, tumbleweeds and all. Except when, once a year, someone lights a fire underground – the smell of fresh bread drifting out across the desert like a beacon for weary travellers.
Underground bakery
Follow your nose and it’ll lead you down a narrow set of stone stairs. Ducking under the low doorway and into a stone chamber, the warmth begins to settle on your skin before your eyes have time to adjust. This room, while pokey and cramped, is home to the only underground Scotch oven still operating in Australia. It's a furnace built straight into the wall, thick enough to hold its heat for hours after the flames die down, burning on and off since 1887. Among the handful of workers, all working elbow to elbow in a space barely big enough for two, it's easy to spot head baker and volunteer Kerry Storer. Balancing a tray of dark, crusty loaves in his arms, he's already climbing the stairs, back into the chaos above.
This bakery is, objectively, in the middle of nowhere. Yet the queue of more than 50 people tells a different story. "It's unbelievable," says Kerry, who's been making the trip up here every season since 2011. "For eight weeks of the year, they come for all these homemade goodies that we make here. It's like a metropolis - people everywhere."
It's like a metropolis - people everywhere.
Kerry Storer
Every morning, Kerry weaves through the crowd with a bright red OPEN sign in tow, nodding to grey nomads and young families who've built their Flinders Ranges road trip around this exact stop. Inside the old weatherboard Patterson building, the queue shuffles forward with the easy chit-chat of people who've been in the car too long. Paper bags pile up along the counter as bench seats fill with rows of coffees.
Word of mouth is how everyone finds this place. Someone ate a vanilla slice out here once and couldn't stop talking about it. Or maybe it was the fruit loaf, or the chunky beef and bacon pie that Kerry's been perfecting for 50 years. He remembers someone driving over 2,000 kilometres from Western Australia, just for a taste.
Sitting in the red dirt, with a pie in hand and looking out at the ruins of a ghost town, it's hard to believe any of this exists. The answer, it turns out, was there all along.
Farina is Italian for flour. In the 1870s, the town was named by settlers who thought they could grow wheat here, after a few good seasons of rain made the land look more promising than it was. But the dream dried up with the Goyder Line — a boundary that foreign settlers didn't know existed, marking the point above which South Australia is too arid to farm. The wheat never came, but the town did: cattle drovers and copper miners, Afghan cameleers and railway workers, two pubs, a school, a police station and even an airstrip. For a while, Farina was a bustling outback town. That’s until the railway closed, the mine dried up and the people moved on, leaving behind little more than sandstone walls and red dirt.
The oven stayed, and today it's the beating heart of the town's revival.
Every year, around 200 volunteers from across Australia make the trip to Farina - stonemasons, bakers, retired teachers, grey nomads - giving up two weeks of their time to run the bakery. In turn, the bakery funds the restoration of this forgotten town. Every pie sold, every vanilla slice, every loaf of bread pulled from that 130-year-old oven goes toward keeping these sandstone walls standing.
The restoration started small. In 2008, Tom Harding, a Victorian caravan tour operator who'd spent years driving tourists past Farina's ruins, sat around a campfire at the end of one of his trips. That night, the group on his tour handed him a plate of $50 notes: $850 in all, and the start of a plan to save the town. That $850 went a long way, as the following year the Farina Restoration Group was born. "If it wasn't for the restoration, most of those buildings would be just a pile of rocks on the ground," says committee member Bill, who has been coming with his wife Deb for fourteen years. There are towns like Farina all over outback Australia, towns that have come and gone, whose stones have long since returned to the earth.
Freshly baked scrolls
18 years on, that vision means 3am starts. Kerry is up, coffee first, then down the stairs and into the heat before most people have stirred in their swags. The mulga wood goes in, the stone floor and walls begin to absorb it, and by the time the doors open the oven has been running for hours. "You can feel the heat as you walk down," says Kerry. "You know it's been stoked correctly the night before. It's a special feeling." Beside him, volunteer David tends the fire, loads the bread in, pulls it back out and keeps the flame alive. "It's hard work," he says. "But I'm not afraid of hard work." The operation runs eight hours a day, using produce sourced almost entirely from South Australia. “If you run out of something, you can't just run down the corner to the local supermarket, because there isn't anything here,” says Kerry.
But the bakers are just the start. Above ground, it takes a small army - volunteers behind the counter, stonemasons working the ruins, a laundry crew, a cleaning crew and people who've been coming back every year for over a decade. "It gets in your blood. And it does, you can't really explain it," says committee member Deb. In the kitchen, the baking comes together to someone singing. By the afternoon, a few of them steal a quiet moment for a cup of tea and a round of cards. At night, 40-odd people pull up chairs around the campfire and decompress after a day of bread and stone and red dirt. Then, in the morning, the whole thing starts again. "Any more sausage rolls?" The question travels down the volunteer line like a relay. "Nah. Nah. Nah."
You walk out into the sun with more paper bags than you can carry. A line of caravans stretches back along the dirt track, dust rising as they peel off onto the Oodnadatta Track. A dog's head hangs out a window, nose to the breeze, taking one last look at the place. In eight weeks, the queue will be gone, the fire will be out, and Farina will be a ghost town again. Until someone lights the oven, and the smell of fresh bread finds its way out across the desert once more.
