Defence Force Families

Welcome Strawberry Fields! We'll likely be up there too in 6-8mths so there you go, you'll have two new friends :) Townsville really is an awesome place so dont let some bad seeds ruin it for you. I had a similar situation but with both military and civilian women and it really soured my first few months up there. There are fabulous people though so just sit tight, you'll find them!!!!

ETA and you, myself and Mrs Bexie are all similar ages and we all have kids so we've already got tons in common! Now for MrsB and I to just be blessed by the SCEMA gods and actually get up there :lol:

Beautitude - our friends live an hour away from the base but she likes that. Her family live in the south of Adelaide and so does his family that it makes great support for her especially since they have 3 kids already and are about to have a baby any day now.


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Beautitude - our friends live an hour away from the base but she likes that. Her family live in the south of Adelaide and so does his family that it makes great support for her especially since they have 3 kids already and are about to have a baby any day now.

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That's exactly why we live in the south. Dh and I are both born and raised in Adelaide so our families live in the south. If we lived out north I would find it very difficult to find support as my entire support network is in the south. I think dh likes it too as he gets so far away from work everyday. He used to live on base when we met which he hated as he never felt like he got away from work iykwim. The driving does drain on him though. We just don't socialize with anyone from the raaf coz we do live so far away so the base so we dont have any close friends from the raaf. Although I do have a friend from work whose hubby is in the raaf so I usually call on her when I feel down about something raaf related. It's just a shame she lives so far away!

Double post!

Freya that's awesome!! We can have our own mothers group of non pretentious women! Hahaha.. It's either Sydney or Townsville for us and really should get Sydney (fx!! I will be devastated if we have to go to Sydney ) when heaps of other single members want it!!

Freya and MrsBexie - Yay! I'll big big and beachbally by then so it would be great to have some friends around for support :). The other wives I know are married to boys in the same unit, same rank as DH, but for some reason they all just hate me! They go out for dinners and put all the pictures on facebook! It hurts so much :( I'm not even that much younger than them, one is only a year older than me so its not even an age gap issue :( I think its because I'm actually from QLD....maybe thats it, maybe it has to do with football!

Strawberry Fields, don't take it to heart. I've only found 4 army wives that I really get on with in the 7 years DH has been in the army. Others I'm nice to when I see them, but they're not women I hang out with. However my problem is that I live no-where near these women. 1 lives in Brisbane, 1 in Darwin (she is moving to Melbourne soon YAYAYA!!! :dance: and the other 2 I've only gotten to know in the last 6 months of 2010 and they're both in Sydney! It can suck at times, but I really hope you find some new friends soon. I found it really difficult when we moved to Wodonga. I wasn't working, I didn't know anybody and I wasn't really meeting anyone either. After about 3 months we started to hang out with 3 other couples more and more and now 2 of the wives are 2 of my best friends. It sometimes can take time to find the right wives that you really click with. I really hope it happens soon for you :hug:

Thanks Tara, I'm not working yet either I'm having a really hard time finding a job and for some reason I dont qualify for help from defence to find one :( So I'm not meeting people either. One of the boys DH is friends with and his gf are really nice but they're from Townsville so they already have a life here so we don't see them as much as I'd like. Plus she's really shy and I think she's a little scared of me and my giantic mouth hahaha I've never had trouble making friends before so I think thats why its hitting me so hard! I'm sure it will work out though, eventually! :)

omg I know what you mean when you talk about the wives! After a really bad experience when we first moved to newcastle I just would NOT bother with any of them... then i had my little boy and went to playgroup (i was so scared of what i'd heard) and the craft group and they were all super lovely. I was really proved wrong.

Ever since that one bad experience i really haven't met anyone who wasn't lovely. Which is strange cos i'd heard all about the bbeeatches.

But i think: 'ah well, I don't want to be your friend if you are such a cow!'

Not sure why some women think they can look down their nose at you cos their husband holds a certain work position??? not like he's socially or morally a better person or whatever. It's just a strange attitude to have and very old fashioned. But i'm a big mouth so if someone was like that to me know, she'd be getting a good ole what for. I ain't shy about confronting someone when i think they are being rude to me lol. My poor DH cringes hahahah.

:) So no one else up in Darwin on here??

Grub: what makes me laugh about the wives who are pretentious because of their husbands rank is that it has nothin to do with them!! Haha.. They arent the sargeant or WO, their husbands are!! They think they are awesome when really it has nothing to do with them!!

Strawberryfields: I just remembered I have a friend who just got posted to townsville with her hubby, they have 2 kids (2-3yo and a 1ish yo) and she is like 22-23yo... I'll ask her if I can pass on her details to you? She is lovely, loud and fun!

MrsBexie that would be great!

I think it might go the other way as well, my sil found that some wives wouldn't have much to do with her because my brother is a wing commander, their hubbies said it was not to good to get too close.

Kitten - My DH doesn't want to get too close to his CO or any officers either, something about never really being able to relax around them. I don't understand why they just can't leave work at work...I mean I used to go out and get smashed with my boss at my old job! Once we clocked off we were just friends, I don't know why the defence force people cant be like that...

I've been with DH for nearly 11 years of the 12 he's been in and I have never experienced first hand a wife being a biatch cause of her husbands rank. It may happen but never to me and it wouldn't/doesn't matter to me what rank husbands are.
When DH was deployed as a lance jack one of my closet friends was the XO's wife.

It is hard for the guys to be friends with higher/lower ranks within their own units or direct teams. I wouldn't be besties with my boss... Im not saying they can't be friendly or a bit social. Saying that tho DH is pretty good at it lol, he seems to balance it. But he is an NCO it's quite different for Officers.

It comes down to what they actually do it's the ADF, war is what most of them train for...if you are sending someone into battle you need to know if you tell someone to go over that trench, so to speak, they will do it and on the flip side they need to be able to tell someone to do it, not hold back.

Grub, I lived in Darwin for years, but that was a long time ago. :)

I have a really dear friend who was an army wife who I worked with for a couple years, still stay in touch all these years later, but since then we have rarely been close enough to base to really be socialising a lot with defence people. In DH's last posting I really needed some help and support from that direction but the social things were always on days when I was working, and there was *no* deployment support until I provided very specific feedback and DCO (which had been critically understaffed) got a new social worker, they finally set up functions every few months (that was Canberra, for any of you ladies there) just before we left. FWIW I think our little family unit breaks probably every single stereotype there is about defence families.

The whole rank structure is a farce anyway. In some musterings you get promoted every few years just by doing the right courses, in other musterings you basically have to wait for someone to die (cos they ain't retiring) and then you're only promoted by merit. Highly unfair when you're excluded from the retention bonuses due to the system's mismanagement of career progression. Plus they have complete ****s in management positions while excellent staff with excellent leadership skills don't hang around that long because they can't justify the sort of decisions that are routinely made.

oh tell me about not falling into the cookie cutter category for the dco sort of events/social things. when we moved to newcastle I got a job a couple of months later then DH got sent away for a few weeks so I was alone in a new place, literally thousands of kms from family and friends. I'd go to work ,where i knew no one cos i was new, and come home and that was it! we didn't even have our pets then, it was so lonely. I'd find I would be chatting to check out chicks like they were my besties! lol.

I find that all the community service type things organised for defence are for married with childrens - and for the couple with no kids, you don't fit in... even worse if you work as all the functions are during the day.

it's a fine line tho, cos they don't want to be working weekends etc and the udnerstaffing makes the actual workers on the ground jobs really difficult. Mind you we didn't get our welcome pack fo 3 yeras!!! lol but I blame DH for that!

yeah marydean - my DH's mustering seems pretty good. Looks like he's going to get promoted soon :) But he's been given a rare opportunity to do something really different in introducing a new computer management program (which is sort of outside his trade, strictly speaking but they saw potential) and is super good at that sort of thing (not biased, he really is!). So he's really had great opportunties in the last few years but he did say that some of the trades are terrible for not being able to move up. Did you like darwin??

ezymay - we live next door to dh's boss and his wife! lol. so there's a car pool system going on hahah. But i'm not overly friendly with the wife (we have just moved here so maybe later) but she's in her 40s with grown children so we're in a different head space.

My biggest hassel here atm is maternal care. Having number 2 in JUne and with only 3 private obstetricians available, I couldn't get a spot with 2 of them and the one who did have a place for me is so hideously expensive he's the reason why the govt cut back on the obst rebate through medicare! he wants to charge about $5000 for ME to push MY baby out and for him to turn up and 'direct'! HA! we can't afford it, the other obst up here charge a reasonable $2000 and are excellent apparently but you've got to book in as soon as you've dtd... unfortunately we had to do Frozen EMbryo Transfer so had to wait for the viability scan at 7 weeks to confirm it all... bbrrrhh. SO I'm having to go public... not very happy about it as heard some real horror stories but am hopeful i'll get into the birth centre.

geez that's the worst bit about moving... finding new docs etc. hate it!

oh dear, blathered on .... again :) ox

Hi ladies! :) I just found this thread (at least, I think I just found it. hehe - who knows if I posted at some stage over the last few months).
DH and I are based in Townsville, and i was born and bred here (so it's well and truly home!). DH is in 1RAR. :)
Strawberry fields - I'll pm you soon - maybe we could catch up for coffee tomorrow? It'll be me and DD (who's 20 months old), so somewhere kid friendly would be good. But I can give you the run down about the obs and the private hospital etc.
Will be exciting if you other girls (Freya and MrsBexie) get posted up here too - then we could have a regular BB meetup! :)

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Wowee, is it really true you're in Adelaide :cheer:! Are you coming to the get together next weekend???

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Yep and Yep.

Beatitude - whereabouts are you? Im originally from the southern burbs, but our new place is in Blakeview, so now I'm learning the north

ETA: Strawberry Fields, I have just moved out of Townsville. There was 1 group of women that were very cliquey, but most of the girls I met were lovely. Head to Geckos for friday playgroup, There is a BB member as one of the co-ordinators and she is lovely.