ABSTRACT
Defence Force careers are often promoted in terms of the qualifications, travel and adventure they offer new recruits. Defence Force career when young recruits mature into parents with family responsibilities. Frequent residential relocation is required of Australian Defence Force (ADF) members to achieve career advancement. As extreme cases of family mobility, the experiences of ADF families thus offer rich insights for mobility research. They pursue ordinary family lives in extraordinarily mobile circumstances, with limited control over when and where they are posted. These ADF families will be situated along the same continuum of possibilities evident in broader contemporary society. This chapter analyses family mobility narratives offered by hypermobile military families. Military families and their 'brats', particularly in the US, has been the object of study from social work and psychological perspectives given their unique stresses associated with frequent relocations, parental absence on deployment, masculinities and normative constraints.
