Ava Janice Martin

The Martins of Craigmore

Ava Janice Martin was born on 15 July 1994 at the Lyell McEwin Hospital in Elizabeth Vale, the second child of Darren Martin, a cabinet maker, and Jenny Martin née Watt, who worked part-time as a pharmacy assistant at the Craigmore chemist. Her older brother Matt was already four when she arrived. The family lived in a brick-veneer house on a side street off Adams Road, in the middle of the Craigmore of the mid-1990s, when the suburb was still fresh enough to have the faintly unsettled quality of a place nobody had quite finished living in yet.

Darren had set up his cabinet-making workshop in the back shed the year before Ava was born, and had run it as a one-man operation ever since — turning out kitchens, wardrobes, and occasional shopfittings for the businesses along Yorktown Road and the other strip centres that were beginning to dot the area. Jenny worked the chemist counter three mornings a week at the pharmacy next door to what would eventually become Ava's workplace — a coincidence that would, in later years, allow Ava to walk to work past her own mother, a fact that both of them agreed was more charming in theory than in practice.

Neither of Ava's parents had been to university, and neither had been ambitious for their children to the point of pressure. The household had always had room for pets — a blue heeler called Jess in Ava's earliest memory, then a mostly-kelpie called Banjo after Jess died, then a cattle-dog mix named Digger, who arrived in 2014 and would spend the next nine years as the animal Ava knew best. Ava had wanted a dog of her own since she was four and had, on three separate occasions between the ages of eight and twelve, quietly begun the paperwork of adoption on her own initiative.

Her relationship with Matt was not the relationship she had hoped for. He had been a sullen teenager by the time she was in primary school and a difficult young adult by the time she was in her own teens, and the gap between them had never quite become the closeness that four-year age gaps sometimes become once both siblings are grown. At twenty Matt had left for a job in the Pilbara and had not come back except for Christmas 2012, which had not gone well. By the time Ava was at high school she had already privately come to think of the family as her parents, the dog, and her, with Matt as an absent figure whose birthday cards her mother remembered and she did not.

Craigmore High

She attended Craigmore High School from 2007 to 2012. Her marks were steady, her subjects mostly humanities, and her school life comfortable without being distinguished. She had a close group of four friends — Tahlia, Beck, Jaz, and Priya — who had largely cohered by Year 8 and would survive, with variations, into her thirties. She liked English and art. She did not like maths. She was quietly competent at biology, though she did not particularly love it.

The four friendships were not particularly dramatic — no great falling-outs, no lifetime epiphanies, no episodes anyone would later make into a story — but they were steady, and they developed across those high school years the particular intimacy that close adolescent girlfriends generate without needing to describe it. Tahlia was the organiser. Beck was the quiet one. Jaz made everyone laugh. Priya was both the conscience and the first of them to learn to drive. They met at the Elizabeth food court on Fridays after school, and later, in their twenties, at the pub of the same name on a rotating basis.

The animal interest that would later come to define her working life was already present through these years but had not yet taken any particular shape. Digger arrived during her Year 12 year and attached himself to her with the particular enthusiasm that dogs develop for the member of the household who is home most often, which in that year was Ava — who had begun quietly skipping afternoon classes to work on her final art portfolio and who had decided, around this same period, that she did not want to go to university.

Two TAFE Courses

The Certificate III in Business Administration at TAFE SA, begun in 2013 immediately after school, was a compromise — a course she had chosen because her mother had suggested it, because it seemed reliably employable, and because she had not yet come up with a better idea. She completed it over two years with adequate results and without finding in it anything that seemed worth continuing. By the time she finished in late 2014 she had already begun circling the idea that she wanted to work with animals, and had enrolled in a Diploma of Animal Studies at TAFE Regency Park for the following year.

The animal studies course was closer to what she had wanted. She enjoyed the practical work. She found, for the first time, a real pleasure in a type of study that had previously only felt like obligation. What she did not enjoy — and had not anticipated she would need to enjoy — was the volume of theoretical content in small-animal nursing, which she had chosen as her specialisation, and the combined pressure of that coursework alongside a minor but chronic anxiety problem which had declared itself properly in 2015 and had never quite gone away afterwards.

She finished the diploma. Her marks were poorer than she had hoped. She emerged with adequate paperwork for entry-level clinical work rather than the stronger credential she had been aiming for, and the shortfall cost her a job at a shelter in Para Hills she had had her heart set on.

Greenfields

Greenfields Veterinary Hospital, where she took her first clinical position in February 2016, was a mid-sized practice on the corner of Womma Road that served the Greenfields area south-west of Craigmore. She was hired initially as a part-time kennel hand with combined reception duties — the practice was in the middle of restructuring its front-desk arrangements — and she moved into a full-time receptionist role six months in. The first eighteen months were good.

The difficulty at Greenfields, when it arrived, was a particular manager — a practice supervisor named Lorraine Bourke who had taken over the administrative side of the clinic in early 2017 and whose management style was of a type Ava had not previously encountered. Lorraine ran the reception area through a combination of small humiliations, withheld information, and the particular kind of performance review that used phrases like "needing improvement" as openers to conversations that were actually about weight or dress or the wrong kind of laugh.

Ava tolerated it for six months and then stopped tolerating it. She left in late 2017 without another role lined up and spent that summer working casual shifts at the Craigmore chemist her mother still worked at, which both of them understood to be a holding pattern. Lorraine was, as it happened, sacked six months later following complaints from three other staff members. Ava, by then, had already moved on.

Starting at Craigmore

The Craigmore Animal Care Centre position came up in December 2017 when Janet Ruddick, the long-serving receptionist who had spanned Bennett and Turner, announced her retirement. Ava applied on the recommendation of a family friend of Jenny's who had taken a spaniel to Turner the year before, interviewed with a mildly distracted Ethan Turner on a Tuesday afternoon in January 2018, and started in early February on a three-month probation that never subsequently came up as a conversation because Turner forgot to formally end it. By the middle of 2018 she had been at the clinic for six months and had begun to understand its actual rhythms, though she would not have said so at the time.

She was twenty-three when she started and had turned twenty-four on 15 July 2018, two weeks before the Thursday evening she would remember afterwards as the one when Jerome Smith arrived with the Border Collie and everything about it turned out, in the slow unfolding way of such things, to matter. The birthday itself had been quiet. She had gone to the pub at Elizabeth with Tahlia and Beck, had two glasses of pinot and a basket of chips, and had come home before eleven because she was opening the clinic the following morning.

Her early months at Craigmore were characterised by the particular texture of a job she was not yet entirely trusted with. She wrote appointment details down in a private shorthand that Turner could not read. She mixed up two spaniels' names in her second week and covered by calling both of them "darling" for the next six months whenever their owners brought them in. She filed things and then could not find them. She talked too much to owners in the waiting room and, more than once, mentioned treatment details she should not have mentioned.

Karen Dobson, who had been at the clinic since 2005 and knew the precise shape of how the front of house was meant to run, corrected her constantly without cruelty. Ava — who had been expecting another Lorraine — slowly realised across her first winter that Karen's corrections were in fact the shape of being trained. The two of them would come, over the subsequent years, to form the particular working partnership that develops between women separated by thirty years of experience who have decided to like each other against the initial odds.

The weekly rhythm settled into her bones over those first several years. Mondays were walk-ins and apologies. Tuesdays were surgeries, which she managed from the front desk with a kind of calm she did not feel. Wednesdays were the quiet day and the day Turner used for his longer consults. By the end of her second year she had learned the names of most of the dogs that came regularly through the door, and when she got one wrong, she had learned how to cover without Karen noticing.

Kyle

She had been dating Kyle Ratcliffe since late 2015. They had met at a mutual friend's twenty-first, had started seeing each other a few weeks later, and had slid — more than advanced — into what both of them described as a relationship across the course of 2016. Kyle worked in a distribution warehouse on the outer edge of Salisbury South and was a year older than she was. He was not a bad person. He was not especially thoughtful either. He was reliable, he was pleasant at barbecues, he had been at her twenty-first and at her mother's fiftieth, and by 2018 their relationship had acquired the quality of an arrangement both of them had forgotten to reassess.

The question of whether she loved him was one she had avoided across the full of 2018 with a discipline she was unaware she was exercising, and which her friends — looking on from outside the relationship — had begun to find conspicuous. The relationship held through the pandemic, during which Kyle's essential-worker status had given it temporary structural weight, and then ended with surprising mildness in the autumn of 2022, when Kyle accepted a warehousing role in Port Adelaide and they agreed, in a conversation that took no longer than a tea, that the move probably meant they were finished.

Through the Pandemic

The pandemic reshaped her job the same way it reshaped everyone's. She worked the kerbside reception system Turner had improvised through March and April of 2020 from the front step of the clinic, in gloves and then a mask, taking owners' names on a clipboard in the car park and running the phones from the doorway. Karen, in her late fifties and worried about her sister's asthma, had briefly considered retiring and had decided against it. Ava, who had discovered that Karen might actually be gone one day, had taken that as a small private shock and made her peace with the trainings she had previously chafed at.

Across 2020 and 2021 she moved out of her parents' house for the first time, into a small unit in Salisbury she shared with Tahlia. The stepping-out had been delayed by Kyle and by her parents' mild disapproval, and had ultimately been precipitated by the intolerable experience of spending six months locked down with her father's cabinet-making schedule. Digger stayed at home with her parents. She visited most weekends. Jenny had become — over those pandemic years — a grandmother to Matt's son, a boy born in 2019 whom the family had never met in person, and the small unresolved grief of that had become one of the running background facts of the household.

Thirty-One

By early 2026 Ava was thirty-one, eight years into the job, and had become — in a way neither she nor Turner had especially noticed happening — the person who actually held the front of the clinic together. She still wrote appointment details in her own shorthand. Karen, by 2026 sixty-two and still threatening retirement, had given up on fully civilising the system and had made her peace with translating it.

The year before she had enrolled tentatively in a part-time veterinary nursing pathway through TAFE — not because she had any intention of leaving Turner, whom she had come to regard with a complicated affection she had no plans to interrogate, but because the Diploma of Animal Studies she had limped through in 2015 had never stopped feeling like a piece of unfinished business. She was doing one unit at a time. She was getting better marks than she had the first time, possibly because the anxiety that had shaped her early twenties had settled, possibly because she was ten years older and cared less about getting everything right.

She had taken up yoga at a studio in Elizabeth in 2023, partly because Tahlia had been going for a year and partly because her back — the back of a woman who had been sitting at the same desk for five years — had begun to protest. She had tried painting again, briefly, in 2024, and had stopped when she realised she did not especially miss it. The house-sharing years had taught her she was not as tidy as she had thought. The living-alone years, which began in early 2024 when Tahlia moved in with a boyfriend, taught her she preferred it that way.

She had not, by 2026, found anyone she meant to stay with in the way her parents had with each other. She had dated, across the years after Kyle, two or three people with no particular conviction. Her friendships with Tahlia, Beck, Jaz, and Priya remained the spine of her social life, and she had become an aunt to two of them — Jaz and Priya having had children across the early 2020s, while Tahlia and Beck had declared at various junctures that they were not going to have children and were content with that position. Digger had died in 2023, aged fifteen. The household at her parents' place had briefly been petless for the first time in Ava's lifetime, and then Jenny had come home with a kitten.