Conservation manager Hayley Glover smiles as she gingerly lifts the lid of a quoll nursery box at Dunkeld Pastoral Company's town acreage, trying not to disturb the small, spotty family inside.
"We've never had an all-black litter before," she says, referring to the 15-year eastern quoll breeding program hosted by the Royal Mail's native garden property.
Inside the wooden box, a mother is resting on her side. She seems resigned to being a cushion for her six, two-month-old black-spotted pups, who are cuddled into her.
One pup stretches and scratches its ear as the light of the day disrupts its long nap, then promptly falls asleep.
At first glance, she doesn't look like the kind of mum who would eat two dozen of her slowest babies, but she did.
"Eastern quolls can give birth to up to 30 young but the mum only has six teats, so it's the first six that latch on then go on to develop," Ms Glover says.
"She often eats the others."
Like kangaroo joeys, quoll pups are born looking like hairless, underdeveloped jelly beans, and they spend weeks growing in mum's pouch.
"If you can picture a grain of rice, that's how small they are," Ms Glover says.
A conservationist through-and-through, Ms Glover finds this gene-selection process impressive.
"It's quite amazing; not only have the millions of sperm got to be accepted, but the second stage is to latch on.
"So it's survival of the fittest a couple of times for the eastern quoll."
Boutique country hotel with quolls
Dunkeld Pastoral Company, the parent company of the Royal Mail Hotel, is owned by Allan and Maria Myers, who have had a long history of investing in conservation and the local community.
For the past 15 years, they've had an eastern quoll breeding program.
Ms Glover says the program fits with the Myers family's decades-long commitment to conservation.
"The pastoral company started out in agriculture, and through the ethos of managing stock, you're managing the land and thinking about how we maintain this land for future generations.
"So that's where that conservation started coming in.
"That evolved into looking at threatened species that we've got currently on our property, and historically, and the eastern quoll are one of those," Ms Glover says.
The quolls were once abundant in Victoria's Western District, but are now extinct on Australia's mainland.
"The eastern quoll became extinct on the mainland in Victoria in about the 50s.
"Now they're only found in Tasmania."
In recent years, Dunkeld Pastoral Company and the Tasmanian Quoll Conservation Program have swapped quolls to ensure diverse gene pools in their programs.
The quolls kept on private property at Dunkeld are in bedroom-sized enclosures to protect them from foxes and wild cats. They are not allowed to roam or hunt in the wild.
Releasing quolls into the wild is still a while away in Victoria.
"In terms of reintroduction, foxes and cats are probably their biggest threat, particularly when they're young, that's when they're most vulnerable," Ms Glover says.
"We'd also need to look at their habitat — lots of fallen timber, logs, they'll use that habitat to nest in and hide from predators, so we'd need to ensure that was out in the landscape."
A local sanctuary on the horizon
With work underway to create a native mammal safe haven quite close to Dunkeld at Mount Vandyke, the quolls may have a sanctuary in the future.
Not-for-profit conservation group, Nature Glenelg Trust, has bought a piece of farmland located in the centre of the Cobboboonee National Park near Portland.
The group's five-year plan is to fence and revegetate Mount Vandyke before releasing native mammals, such as brown bandicoots, long-nosed potoroos and eastern quolls into the area.
Project manager Mark Bachmann says the trust jumped at the opportunity to buy the land, which is in an area already part of the Glenelg Ark fox control program.
"The project is about taking this area of farmland in the middle of the park and bringing back its missing environmental values," Mr Bachmann says.
"Its location presents the opportunity to do something really special with some of our threatened species of marsupials.
"Dunkeld Pastoral are likely to be one of our partners for quolls, but it is early days and none of that is decided yet."
Nature Glenelg Trust is paying its loan for the land with donations from local community members and philanthropists as far away as the United States.
It's money well spent, according to Mr Bachmann.
"Our small mammals on the mainland have suffered major declines since foxes were released in Victoria in the late 1800s, with many now extinct in the wild in western Victoria," he says.
"The project is aiming to help reverse that trend."
Misunderstood and misnamed
Wildlife researcher Robert Wallis, who has been researching marsupials since the 1960s, says eastern quoll were abundant in the Western District up until the late 1800s.
"The eastern quoll were absolutely prolific in south-west Victoria but are now extinct on the mainland," Professor Wallis, from Federation University, says.
"They're a delightful, beautiful little animal."
During the mid-1800s quolls were considered a pest and were hunted.
Professor Wallis says historical records show in 1850 near Casterton 600 quolls were shot in one night.
"There was actually a bounty at one stage. In Warrnambool, they were paid a halfpenny per scalp, but in the end the government had to stop this because there were just so many scalps returned.
"They were being persecuted by people mostly because their favourite delicacy was chickens, even though they were actually good at controlling rabbits.
"They could scurry down rabbit warrens and kill the kittens.
"It's a bizarre thing, by eliminating quolls, the rabbit population surged."
Time to rethink its name
According to Ian Abbott from the Department of Conservation in Kensington, Western Australia, quolls have been long misunderstood and misnamed.
Dr Abbott has uncovered about 400 Indigenous names for quolls.
He says in Australia's early days as a British colony, quolls were termed "native cats" or "wild cats", even though they are marsupials and no relative or friend of felines.
Dr Abbott thinks it's time to rethink the creature's name.
In his study titled Extending the application of Aboriginal names to Australian biota he writes:
"The four Australian species of Dasyurus currently possess linguistically or geographically inappropriate vernacular names. The western quoll originally occurred extensively in eastern Australia, the eastern quoll originally occurred only in south-eastern Australia (including Tasmania), and the Aboriginal name 'quoll' strictly refers to D. hallucatus in north Queensland."
He believes the new common name for the eastern quoll should be luaner.
Luaner is a Tasmanian Indigenous word, chosen by Dr Abbott to symbolise the only remaining wild population of the eastern quoll in Australia, and the source for any future hopes of repopulation of the mainland.