"We are a much-unloved people," leading Yes campaigner Noel Pearson said when he delivered the first of his Boyer Lectures 12 months ago.
"We are perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to. We are not popular and we are not personally known to many Australians. Few have met us and a small minority count us as friends."
Despite this, he said, "Australians hold and express strong views about us, the great proportion of which is negative and unfriendly. It has ever been thus. Worse in the past but still true today."
If success at the referendum was predicated on popularity as a people, he said, "then it is doubtful we will succeed".
"It does not and will not take much to mobilise antipathy against Aboriginal people and to conjure the worst imaginings about us and the recognition we seek. For those who wish to oppose our recognition, it will be like shooting fish in a barrel. An inane thing to do — but easy. A heartless thing to do — but easy."
Regardless of what the referendum result is, Pearson's prediction of how the campaign leading up to it might run has proved painfully accurate.
The abuse and even death threats faced by Indigenous people on both sides of the debate are shocking.
As my colleague, ABC Indigenous Affairs Editor Bridget Brennan, wrote this week: "Indigenous people deserved so much better than the debate we were subjected to this year: the misinformation, death threats, conspiracy theories, the racist nonsense and everything in between. The worst of Australia has been on display."
And regardless of what the referendum result is, it seems there have been many backward steps: reports of increasing hostility to welcomes to country and acknowledgements of country, as one example.
That is, things that seemed to have been small markers of progress appear to have been eroded in the atmosphere of the past 12 months or so.
The shift in sentiment
Indigenous Australians would have every reason to feel even less loved than they were when Pearson spoke 12 months ago.
There will be lots of political blame games about what caused the result if, as most polls predict, the referendum proposition goes down.
There will be lots of analysis of the arguments that have been used.
A simple, but brutal, starting point is to ask yourself what is the key message of the Yes and No campaigns and who was the key figurehead of each.
It is much easier to answer the No questions than the Yes ones.
But there will also be a lot of soul-searching about what the result tells us about ourselves.
Tony Mitchelmore does qualitative polling with his company, Visibility Consulting. The focus groups he has conducted in recent months give us a portrait of the Australian voter contemplating the referendum. Or perhaps more significantly, the Australian voter not contemplating the referendum.
Mitchelmore says the Voice rarely even rates a mention in focus groups and doesn't even generate much discussion when it is brought up, though occasionally views can get heated. The way he describes sentiment is that people feel "worn out" on the Voice.
And that is without it ever reaching a level of importance or priority to give it "the cost of entry", as he puts it.
The issue absorbing the focus groups is the cost of living.
When polls were showing support for recognition and the referendum at around 60 per cent, Mitchelmore says, it was support based on sentiment — on the vague idea that, yes, Indigenous people had indeed had a bad time and that there was a significant body of goodwill to the idea of doing something to fix that.
But it has not been possible to capture or crystallise that goodwill into the specific Voice proposal.
"It's that 'I want to buy a new car but I am not sure about this one' phenomenon," he says.
Loading...Add to this the backdrop of a growing sullenness over the cost of living and the difficult task of getting a change in the constitution became that much harder.
The cost of living phenomenon started as something voters linked to events like the war in Ukraine, and the conversation then went on to cover the impact of interest rates on mortgages and prices rising at rates that shocked people. People weren't particularly blaming the government.
Then, Mitchelmore says, came a shift when the realisation hit that this was the new reality — that this was people's financially stressed lot for the foreseeable future. There was a general anger — at governments, at big corporations.
And now it is starting to turn on the Albanese government.
LoadingNo will change how we see ourselves
There are countless reports of people saying they will vote No in the referendum to "send the government a message" on issues ranging from the cost of living to how much the government is spending on submarines. All the elements of the culture wars have been reported too, as is reflected by the No camp's talk of "elites".
Lost along the way have been the arguments about what constitutional recognition — and recognition through a Voice — represented to a group of people who have not only been badly mistreated since white settlement, but for generations were literally and legally controlled and told what to do. A promise of change, a chance to have a say in their lives.
Not all No voters are racist. Not all No voters are angry about the cost of living.
Many have been genuinely concerned about the legal questions raised or about lack of detail.
But a No vote — and how we got to one — will change the way we see ourselves, and send the most unloving of messages to Indigenous Australians.
Even before getting to the issue of what is to be done instead to practically fix disadvantage, how awkward will it seem to celebrate Indigenous culture?
Noel Pearson said in October last year that "race and the Aboriginal problem of Australia is about white Australians in a cultural and political struggle with other white Australians".
"It is yet another agenda of the culture wars. The progressives are seen as, and see themselves as, sympathetic to the Aborigines and see their conservative opponents as bigoted and determined to hold onto the legacy of the country's old racism."
Loading30 years ago to now
Last century, I reported on the Mabo and Wik decisions. They brought to the forefront of the national debate a vibrant group of young indigenous leaders, including Pearson and Marcia Langton.
After the change of government in 1996, my then-colleague Niki Savva and I interviewed then-prime minister John Howard and, in the course of the interview, he labelled that group as essentially a bunch of Labor operatives.
They were frozen out and dismissed. Pearson remade himself with a welfare agenda that struck a chord with Coalition MPs, including Tony Abbott
Last week, Abbott cast Pearson adrift and suggested Langton (an academic) had been running Indigenous policy for decades.
My powerful recollection of that time was meeting with a group of some of these young leaders on a cold Canberra night after they had been effectively locked out by the Coalition. And of them fading, defeated, into the night after we had spoken.
Almost 30 years later, it feels that is about to happen again.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.