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In 1936 a flurry of newspaper reports alleged widespread prostitution of Aboriginal women and girls to Japanese pearlers. The claims had a dramatic impact. Within weeks of them being printed a report was placed before the Department of the Interior. A vessel was commissioned to patrol the Arnhem Land coast. The allegations were raised at the first meeting of State Aboriginal protection authorities. Cabinet closed Australian waters to foreign pearling craft and a control base was established in the Tiwi Islands. Japanese luggers were fired upon with machine guns and a crew detained in Darwin. These escalating events occurred within five years of a series of attacks on Japanese by Aborigines (culminating in the infamous Caledon Bay spearing of five trepangers, along with the killings of two white men and one policeman on Woodah Island), and only five years before Australian and Japanese forces waged war. Much ink was spilt over the course of this print scandal, and while reports made use of established language such as 'vice' and 'outrage', a telling omission was the commonly known phrase 'Black Velvet'. The lapse could be considered a deliberate attempt to mask the expression's explicit reference to the tactile sensations associated with illicit white contact with racialised genitals. However tracing its use reveals that the phrase exclusively pertained to white men's sexualisation of Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women were not 'Black Velvet' to Japanese men, indicating this colloquial language played a role in establishing settlers' sense of proprietorial ownership of Aboriginal women's bodies -quite literally, for whom Aboriginal women were out-of-bounds.The pearling scandal played out principally in print and this article focuses on that media coverage to provide both context and contrast to the use of the term 'Black Velvet'. It examines reports of this episode as it unfolded along Australia's northern coastline to show how frontier sexuality was mapped onto national borders and racial and gender identifications. As Ann Stoler argues in her work on carnality and imperial power, 'the management of the sexual practices of colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things and [that] discourses of sexuality at once classified colonial subjects into 1 Terms historicised in this article remain offensive and have continuing power to offend. This article attempts to dispel and challenge the meanings conveyed by the term 'Black Velvet' by tracing its use in print media and thereby intervening in the attitudes it disseminated.

To cite this article: Liz Conor (2011) "Strangely clad": enclosure, exposure, and the cleavage of empire, Journal of Australian Studies, 35:2,[185][186][187][188][189][190][191][192][193][194][195][196][197][198][199][200] To link to this article: http://dx.