'Now we got truck everywhere, we don't travel anywhere': A phenomenology of travelling by community mutika in the northern Kimberley, Western Australia

Motor vehicles tend to be highly personalised in all kinds of cultural milieus. The process of personalisation is primarily achieved through a projection of the travelling subject's own bodily schema onto the body of the vehicle. These strongly libidinal/narcissistic bodily investments are made visible, for example, in the penchant for personalised numberplates that expand parts of a vehicle owner's/user's bodily ego into that of their vehicle, in how some male truck drivers paint their wife's or girlfriend's name on their cab panels so that the driver is imaginarily travelling inside the desired woman's cab/body, or even in the way we might speak of a vehicle being 'gutsy' or 'gutless'. The projection of bodily schemata is also apparent in the way we internally differentiate a vehicle so that we might speak not just of its 'body', but also of its 'headlights', its 'tail' or 'arse-end', its steering arms and so on. Conversely, a vehicularisation of the human body is evident in idioms such as 'punching someone's lights out', 'making tracks' or 'going off the rails'. This dialectic between corporealisation of vehicles and a vehicularisation of the body is no less evident in the tropes used by the Indigenous people of the Kimberley region of north-western Australia where the forms of embodiment that are projected onto (and introjected from) vehicles take on the specificity of local body imagery and the particular ways in which vehicles are used there.