'Yes' volunteer, former Walgett teacher, Loy Buckley sees the Voice gain for all of Australia

As the days run down to the October 14 referendum date, the 84-year-old Anglican minister and former outback teacher is out letter-boxing in and around Queanbeyan and engaging on the merits of the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament, receiving polite "thank yous", "keep up the good works!" and, on one occasion, a "very rude" middle finger.

She regards it as a "great positive" that she has not seen any delivered letters thrown on the ground.

Loy Buckley taught Aboriginal students back in 1964 in the remote northern NSW town of Walgett for a year, a period that made a "very deep impression."

"That wasn't a big part of my history, but it certainly made a big impact," she told The Canberra Times. "It was before the '67 referendum. And the Aborigines were treated really very badly. Very badly."

Amid the "utter deprivation" she saw, Ms Buckley made a connection with a family who had a father who would do anything to make sure his daughters had an education at the local Catholic school.

The shearer, to get around mission transport which refused to stop for his girls at the school, would drop his daughters with the teachers early in the morning and pick them up in the evening after a job.

"That resolution that he showed and the commitment that he showed and the determination just made a tremendous impact," she said.

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Ms Buckley has a lifelong connection to First Nations people that Indigenous leader Noel Pearson has explained as not as common as it should be, and one of the weaknesses of the "yes" campaign.

"We just haven't been in the homes of most Australians," Pearson told ABC radio last week. "Most Australians have never had us over for a meal. They don't know who we are. The only thing they see of us is largely in the media and quite a large proportion of that is quite negative. It's understandable, but we will bridge that."

The former teacher is one of almost 40,000 volunteers in what the official Yes23 campaign describes as a "people-powered campaign." The Canberra region remains one of the positive places for the Voice. About 5,000 people attended the Walk for Yes event in Canberra on Sunday, three times as many as expected.

The Queanbeyan resident proudly displays Indigenous art on her walls and she explained she likes to walk the local River Walk and feel the connection to the land.

"When I walk this land, I look at the trees and the rocks and the hills and I think, before this area was settled, where did the Aborigines make their shelter? Did they walk down the hill this way?" she explained.

"I sense their footprints. I have a great sense of how they have inhabited this place. I tend to look at nature now and in terms of the original inhabitants. Did they get fish from the river or not? How sensitive were they to flooding and so on."

Ms Buckley said more work needs to be done to critically engage over the Voice, particularly in regional areas and with older people, but she insists as a starting point voters should read the guiding Voice document the Uluru Statement of the Heart or actively compare the two sides in the official referendum pamphlet.

"I hope that people will take the time to actually read some proper information," she said.

"Everything about this Statement from the Heart is just so inclusive because, as it says here 'With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia's nationhood," she said.

"They're not saying let's obliterate all the good things that have come with colonisation and education and so on. They're not saying that, but they're saying put us in the picture, put us in the picture."

She offers that the engagement is not just what can be done for Indigenous people, but what Indigenous people can contribute to society as they've "got a wisdom that belongs to the land itself."

But, for the argument against, she is urging a critical eye.

"I think if they read it well, or even with a friend, you'd soon pick up this language of risk and fear and risk and fear as though the world is going to fall in. And we were a bit like that with the marriage equality debate," she told The Canberra Times.

"Everyone thought, 'Oh, it's the end of family life. It's the end of marriage. It's the end of this. It is the end of that.' And life has gone on.

"And I can think back to Y2K and the fear of the calendar turning over to 2000. It was going to be an absolute calamity. Airplanes were going to fall out of the sky and so on. And I just think we like to get hyped up for the sake of getting hyped up."