Your “Eyesore,” My History?

Abstract

In this article we visit a car junkyard in the small Arnhem Land outstation of Nalawan in the top end of Australia’s Northern Territory. Using both a mobilities paradigm and recent theorizing of waste from the global south, we will argue through our ethnographic observations that the wrecked cars become mobile, reassembled, and reconceptualized in a range of surprising ways. Though now immobile, the stories they encapsulate continue to circulate and reverberate with the complexities and tensions of Indigenous mobilities.