West Gippsland's Angela Betheras remembers the day she said, "Dad, I'd like to be a farmer".
"Well, you better get a job and earn some money because you're not getting mine," her late father John Betheras replied.
And so a career in Melbourne beckoned.
"I was a corporate girl. My last role was international supply chain manager for Coles Myer," Angela says.
She eventually found her way back to the land, near where she spent her childhood on her parents' Charolais cattle property at Labertouche, over an hour east of the city.
"My dad never really let us ride the tractors or things like that," she says.
Fencing, he said, was "really boring".
"I curse him. He's no longer alive, but when I have to fix a fence I go, 'Why didn't you just let me do fencing when I was little?' Then I could fix the damn fence myself," Angela says.
Entrepreneurial skills appeared early
Angela now runs Nickelby at Darnum, an alpaca farm at Yarragon, almost entirely on her own.
She has a little help from Betty, her Massey Ferguson tractor, and a strong network of contractors she has built up over about 15 years.
The farm fence is by no means where her business ends.
A childhood spent mostly on horseback set Angela up for a lifetime of hard work, risk-taking and entrepreneurial thinking.
When the "bottom fell off the beef market", she remembers her parents warning their children they would need to tighten their belts again.
At four years old, she replied: "If we tighten our belts any further, we're just not going to be able to breathe".
"My family quote me all the time," Angela says.
"I worked in a tin garage selling hot dogs and pies and pasties from grade five right through to second year uni. I never had weekends off."
She had her own business ideas too – one being selling seashells at the beach to her friends, whose parents did not appreciate the clever business idea.
'Doing something I love'
Angela now has about 50 alpacas, which provide the fleece for garments she designs and sells in her Yarragon store.
She dyes and weaves the fibres herself too, with a lot of washing and drying in between.
"So I think I work for about $5 an hour," she says.
Fortunately, she finds the alpacas intelligent and easy to farm.
"You don't herd them up, they just follow you like a Pied Piper. They're very intriguing," she says.
"People say, you could be earning big bucks in Melbourne, but I go, 'How boring's that?'
"I don't tend to follow the rules of anything."
Every piece of fleece is different
This character trait led her to Japan in 2016 to study a design movement that celebrates the free and unique.
"I'm not good at following patterns," Angela says.
She met the late founder of Saori weaving, Misao Jo, who was 103 years old and did not speak at the time.
"[Misao Jo] took a liking to me. I don't know whether she thought I was funny or whatever, but she kept coming up to me and giving me cuddles," she says.
The Saori movement started by accident, literally, when Misao Jo created a flawed kimono sash.
Her work was rejected, but Misao Jo saw beauty in its human quality.
"I see it like painting on a loom and every piece being different."
Today, the practice carries on without its founder despite there being only three registered Saori teachers in Australia.
Angela employs Saori philosophy in all her work.
For example, someone might order a black and white scarf.
"I'll have to say, I'm really sorry, there's a spot of red in there," she says.
No holidays despite ill health
Angela was diagnosed with melanoma in 2018 and undergoes treatment at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne.
Although she has been highly independent in her career, cancer has taught her to accept more help.
"When I was diagnosed with my cancer, a lot of [contractors] came out and helped me spray and things like that, which was lovely," she says.
But she makes sure a day trip to Melbourne for treatment is a special event.
"Everyone is working, waiting for their holidays. I don't actually look to go on holidays," she says.
"If I took a week off, it would be to go back to Japan … I'd do a crawl around the country going to wool shops — that is my life. Or go and see another alpaca breeder or go and check out some fertiliser."
But she admits, her work style is "pretty manic".
"My studio … has fibre all over the floor, threads, bits that I've cut and chopped yarn everywhere," she says.
"Sometimes I think I'd just love to be an author and I could sit somewhere in a cafe with a laptop, that would be so nice instead of this mess that I create everywhere."
