It's lambing season on the Kruger family's merino farm, which means that Tracey Kruger is waking up each day with a singular focus: To search the property for orphaned lambs to save.
"Normally the lambs, they might have been a twin or a triplet and the mum's wandered off with the rest of them and left the weakest one behind," Ms Kruger said.
"Quite often there's only a spark of life left in them."
Ms Kruger brings the motherless lambs home and uses several ingenious techniques to bring them back to health, including keeping them warm in woollen baby garments.
It seems obvious really — that real wool would be the perfect remedy for a lost, cold, motherless lamb.
And in this particular part of Victoria, the western district, wool is still a fabric laden with emotion and history: it is venerated and loved — it's devaluation is mourned.
In this region, wool and sheep even have their own festivals: the joyful Woolly West Fest in Dunkeld, and Sheepvention in Hamilton.
Lambs bring joy for NYC's lonely
For years, Ms Kruger has been taking photos of life on her farm and in her community — the shearers, the footy and netball, the races and polo events and, of course, baby animals.
She shares that documentation on social media, almost like a local newsletter for her rural community.
Ms Kruger has also self-published half a dozen children's books about farming life, with the objective of celebrating the hard work farmers do, and giving city kids a taste of living on the land.
Lambing season has always featured prominently in her publications and they have been an audience favourite.
"Lambing is my favourite season on the farm," Ms Kruger said.
"This time of year, when the ewes are lambing, we check them regularly to make sure there's no problems with birthing — and I may need to deliver some lambs.
"When I'm going around the sheep, I often find one that's just been left behind and, quite often, it will be weak, hardly able to stand up."
That's when Ms Kruger knows to pop the lamb into the warmth of her jumper and take it home for the night.
"I love the lambs. They're such good company!" she said.
Ms Kruger shares the journey of each lamb on her social media accounts and, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, her documentation of the lambing season has resulted in hundreds of messages from around the world.
"There are a lot of people very invested in my lambing at the farm," she said.
"I would get dozens of messages on a daily basis from people saying they were by themselves.
"They might be in a New York apartment, and the highlight of their day was getting up in the morning, seeing my lambs in their jumpers running around.
"It occasionally has made me quite sad.
"The lockdown for many of those people was long, and hard, and extremely lonely. And that was the same in Melbourne."
Once Ms Kruger realised that some people were relying on her daily dose of joy, she made a concerted effort to keep up the constant feed of posts about baby animals.
"I've had hundreds of messages, and it's quite time-consuming to try to reply to everyone," she said.
"I've learnt how to use talk to text a lot, to save time!"
Bringing lambs back to life
The other correspondence that Ms Kruger started receiving was in the post, when hand-knitted baby jumpers from all around Australia started arriving at the farm.
"I started off buying newborn knits from op-shops for the lambs" she said.
Then, as people became more and more invested in the fate of the newborn lambs, a touching thing happened. People around the nation began knitting.
"People from all over Australia now knit jumpers for me and mail them to me free of charge, because they just love seeing them on the babies"
These jumpers aren't a cute trick to make the lambs more 'Instagrammable' — they have a life-saving function for an orphaned lamb.
Ms Kruger explains that a lamb with its mother is normally safe from the elements and predators.
"Their mother normally licks them dry after birth and they're completely fine then," she said.
"They've got a mother to cuddle up to and their own wool, and that generally keeps them really nice and warm.
"But, if they haven't been licked properly at the start, they lose their body heat really quickly."
The key ingredients to saving an abandoned newborn lamb is to get its body temperature back up, and to feed it milk.
Once Ms Kruger gets the lambs home, she cleans them up and uses heat lamps to get life back into them. After that, the day-old lambs get their new outfits.
It usually takes at least one night for the lambs to come good and, as soon as she can, Ms Kruger then tries to get the lambs back out into the paddock to pair them up with a new mum.
That's right, a 'foster ewe'.
Fostering orphaned lambs
"There's a real business to reintroducing a lamb to a new mother," Ms Kruger said.
Once a lamb is back on its hooves again, Ms Kruger tries to pair it up with a new mum who lost her own lamb during its birth. If she still has that lamb, she rubs the scent of it on the living lamb.
She then uses enclosed wire rings in the paddock to safely contain the new mum and orphaned lamb together for the morning.
"I give them plenty of hay and water and check on them during the course of the day," she said.
"Normally the ewe will mother-up to whoever is closest to her and, by the end of the day, they will wander away like a nice, new family unit."
"It's amazing with the foster-mothering.
"Some of the ewes will almost take the lambs out of your hands, nuzzling it as if it was their own baby.
"But some of the lambs that I rescue take a couple of days to come good, and they're the ones that end up being my pets and being fed at home."
Remembering dad on the daily rounds
Saving orphaned lambs is a job that Ms Kruger loves and one that she learnt as a child from her father, Ivor Duffield.
"One of my earliest memories growing up was going around the sheep with my dad," she said.
"I can still remember, it was getting dark, and singing 'My grandfather's clock' and picking up a pet lamb.
"That's a beautiful memory for me.
"Dad taught me all his little tricks, and I've applied those now on the farm that I live at."
Mr Duffield died in March this year from melanoma.
Ms Kruger says that lambing season has given her the joyful focus she needed, in order to move through her grief.
"I probably think of Dad every day when I'm going around the sheep," she said.
"Every time I'm battling to save one, or I'm deciding whether I need to pick one up, I can hear him in the background from when I was a little girl saying 'Don't just bring them home just because they look cute!" she said.
"So every single time I do the job, I think of Dad."