A Voice referendum "no" vote victory - as current opinion polling suggests - would deal a major blow to Australia's image abroad as "a big warm country full of friendly people."
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This bit of the international narrative about Australia we like because we tend to see ourselves in these terms. But also because, at least since Paul Hogan's Crocodile Dundee, it puts thousands of tourists on airplanes bound for Australia every year.
The related notion of a culturally diverse and progressive Australia has also served us well. Or did. Visiting Sydney in 1996, former US president Bill Clinton went close to calling Australian multiculturalism the most successful in the world: "the shining example," he said, "of how people can come together as one nation and one community". The message? Australia is not only generous and open-hearted, but prepared to do things its own way and succeed where others could not.
This changed dramatically in the years afterwards, with the Tampa and "Children Overboard" affair, through to the Pacific Solution, Stop The Boats and the dual-party disgrace of Manus Island. "The most sinister exercise in cruelty in the world's refugee crisis," said the New York Times. As if the real Australia had been hiding in the shadows and suddenly collared looked morally suspect.
Still, as any Australian who's lived in Europe can attest, it's Australia's incapacity to meet the needs of Indigenous people that most enduringly damages the national brand.
Overseas followers of Australian politics often know there's been land rights legislation, an effort to rename major landmarks (Ayers Rock is Uluru) and considerable sums of government money spent over time on assorted Indigenous projects and programs. The point being that if the "problems" associated with Indigenous Australia were easy to fix, they'd have been fixed.
Except that our poor record on improving the plight of Indigenous Australians - low life expectancy; high infant mortality rates; high numbers in prisons; high rates of suicide and so on - is going to look like making excuses, if we still won't recognise our Indigenous brethren in the constitution, or vote for the creation of an external advisory council. And these things tend to have an accumulating negative effect on perceptions over time.
Using Indigenous art and culture to promote Australia, highlighting its prominence in such as the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, is going to look increasingly like a fairly cynical exercise. The old refrain about Australia's economic success story, with the usual touchstones of high-growth, reform-minded, flexible, resilient, dynamic and the rest - is ultimately, in fact, highly conditional.
A Paradise Of The South we may be, but quite possibly not - quite probably not - if you're Aboriginal or a Torres Strait Islander, descendants of Australia's original inhabitants, massacred (Waterloo Creek 1837-8; Forrest River 1926; Coniston Station 1928; ...), stolen as children or dead in custody, the assorted horrors of what former governor-general Sir William Deane called "our legacy of unutterable shame".
As the French political communications specialist Raphael Llorca has pointed out, globalisation requires a country to produce simple indicators of itself in a competitive market that are quick and easy for foreigners to understand and consume.
A "no" vote would open another window on Australia that suggests something, well, kind of soulless at the core. A Crocodile Dundee written in the wind, if you will, not quite gone perhaps, but decidedly faint. In simple terms, compromised, "found out".
And from abroad at least, it won't be seen as politicians or writers or major artists or sporting personalities seeking to control some official narrative about Australia. It will have been the people's vote, the people's choice. And in today's world, it's hard to distinguish who you are, from who you're seen to be.
- Richard Ogier is a journalist and communications consultant based in Strasbourg.
