Award-winning journalist Karla Grant has been shocked by the level and volume of racial abuse directed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the lead-up to the referendum on a First Nations voice.
Ms Grant, a Western Arrernte woman, has been reporting on Indigenous affairs, including constitutional recognition since it was on the political agenda in the late 1990s under prime minister John Howard.
"The amount of abuse racial abuse online directed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and some of the arguments that have occurred during this whole campaign have gotten really nasty," she said.
"That's really surprised me.
"I just never imagined that it would get nasty and so many awful things would be said and so many people turning against each other and the racial abuse directed towards people on both sides of the argument."
For Ms Grant, the fearmongering and misinformation about the voice harks back to earlier times.
"It actually reminded me of Mabo (the 1992 High Court decision that overturned terra nullius)," she said.
"When this started happening, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, we're going back to the '90s, when there was all that scaremongering tactics like 'We're going to take your backyard'.
"People have certainly been spreading misinformation and disinformation."
The other aspect of the referendum, which is being held on Saturday, that Ms Grant finds surprising is that it's happening at all.
In 2017, following a series of Indigenous dialogues on constitutional recognition, First Nations delegates met at Uluru, where they developed and issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
The Uluru Statement called for a First Nations voice in the constitution, which came as a shock to the coalition government under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who rejected it out of hand.
Mr Turnbull has since changed his stance and has been publicly campaigning in favour of the voice.
"Having a rejection from Turnbull, it almost seemed like it was dead in the water back then," Ms Grant said.
"And then, Scott Morrison comes in, and they do this co-design process, led by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma and now we're staring down the barrel of this referendum that was kind of never meant to happen."
During her coverage of the referendum, Ms Grant travelled to Europe to meet representatives of the Sami parliament, the body that represents indigenous people of Norway.
"That's been going for 34 years and the sky hasn't fallen in there, nothing bad has happened, the country is still running and everything's fine," she said.
"They're having a lot of success in terms of language revitalisation and culture."
"The Sami were colonised and dispossessed of their land and weren't allowed to speak their language or practise their culture for hundreds of years."
Ms Grant is hosting a special episode of SBS current affairs program Insight on the voice referendum on Tuesday featuring guests from a variety of ages, backgrounds and locations with diverse perspectives on how they plan to vote.
