Marree Man, a desert artwork which mysteriously appeared in the outback almost two decades ago, has returned to the far north of South Australia.

Marree Hotel publican Phil Turner and other locals have worked for the past five days to plough the outline back into the desert sands.

"This is about restoring the myth and the mystery. We did everything we possibly could to ensure we're doing justice to the original creators," he told 891 ABC Adelaide.

"It's about what we, in the far north of SA, can develop and I think now we've got a long-term, sustainable attraction that hopefully will provide a lot of benefits.

"We desperately need tourism and I think everyone in the area recognises that."

The artwork was first spotted in 1998 and became a big tourist attraction, as people descended on the remote area in four-wheel-drives, or got the best view by flying over the desert.

"There's a tremendous amount of myth and mystery because no-one saw anyone actually put it on the ground," Mr Turner said.

"The original creators haven't come forward and that, of course, has given speculation to how it was done, who did it."

Outback pub visitors remembered the original

Mr Turner said the big number of pub visitors who remembered the artwork after it had all but disappeared into the sand made him keen to revive it.

"Because we'd been getting inquiries about it every day at the hotel, about three years ago I started working with the Arabana Aboriginal Corporation to talk about the possibility of restoring it," he said.

Marree Man is best appreciated from the air. ( Wikimedia Commons: Peter Campbell )

"You could see some evidence on the ground of the original work — the right-hand side of the man had totally disappeared but we did find, in doing our ground surveys, about 250 original bamboo nursery skewers (stakes) that were used to peg out the Marree Man back in 1998.

"I mean, that's an extraordinary effort in itself considering it's 28 kilometres around, and every 10 metres around they'd put in a bamboo nursery skewer."

Improvements in technology made it much easier to accurately plot Marree Man this time, with the keen restoration team using GPS and images taken from space.

"With technology today we could gradually merge all this and build up a data file that gave us a very, very accurate grid reference on the ground," Mr Turner explained.

He said the restoration work started last Monday and was finished on Friday afternoon.

"I've never used a grader as a paint brush before, but we did," he said.