This paper attempts to insert transnational labour into (the shifting) geographies of global mining production networks in ways cognisant of gender as organising principle. The empirical focus is the experiences of a group of international ‘trailing wives’ who migrated to Boddington in Western Australia in order to accompany male partners who had taken up skilled employment in a nearby gold mine. As Parrenas (2000) has argued, attending to the families of migrant workers enables not only a necessary attention to divisions of labour in gendered terms but also a fuller explanation of labour migration. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews, this paper engages with the role of place and rurality in shaping the individual experiences of, and senses of agency in relation to, labour migration. These are in turn linked to broader structural dimensions and social actors foregrounded in the notion and organisation of global production networks.