I chose to research Aboriginal Australian tattooing traditions because I’m going to be studying abroad in Sydney in the spring, and I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the culture. I found that there actually weren’t a lot of tattooing practices in Aboriginal Australia, but there were practices of scarification and ceremonial body painting. I found some information about the ceremonial practices and how women would paint their bodies and sing and dance as a means of healing the community and passing on tradition. These traditions were grounded in the Dreamtime, a time when mythical beings were created and connections between humans and nature were established. They incorporated song in this ritual, which I remember learning about in my Intro to World Music class last fall. I thought this could be a potential topic for my final project about song lyrics, as I could also look into how music is visually represented on the body. Dreamtime is also the basis for much of the natural imagery used in body painting, and now modern Aboriginal-influenced tattooing. In my research on this, I found a tattoo artist, Tatu Lu, who does these Aboriginal-influenced tattoos with the intention of helping people connect to their Aboriginal ancestry. She also tattoos non-indigenous people (such as herself) with designs of Australian botanicals and fauna, connecting people to Australia. Though this is a modern practice, it is rooted in Aboriginal traditions, connecting the past to the present and future, which is exactly the point of Dreamtime. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I chose to research Aboriginal Australian tattooing traditions because I’m going to be studying abroad in Sydney in the spring, and I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the culture. I found that there actually weren’t a lot of tattooing practices in Aboriginal Australia, but there were practices of scarification and ceremonial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11776,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11776"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":627,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}