Despite the promised week of silent mourning for the defeat of the Voice to Parliament, the recriminations and blame-to-be-laid are in full throttle – or should that be voice?

The Leader of the Opposition is first in line to be bucketed by the Yes campaign, with complaints that Dutton refused to give bi-partisan support etc. These noises continue now that he has ‘gone back on proposing another referendum’.

This is the howl of insanity. If every state, along with the Northern Territory, voted with a resounding ‘No’ (including South Australia, the hoped-for swing state to which the Prime Minister gave such careful attention, sending back the second largest negative vote) why would Peter Dutton promise more of the same in years to come?

As someone guilty of handing out ‘No’ flyers in Sydney’s multicultural, multi-lingual Ryde, I saw firsthand how the campaign proceeded, and how – to the shame of Australia’s elites – it divided us along class and economic lines. As was expected, affluent and well-educated Teal seats returned ‘Yes’ votes, while – in stark contrast – Western Sydney voted ‘No’.

Perhaps that should have been ‘mayoh’ Mandarin Chinese for ‘no’ because that was what was being murmured as Asian families lined up on Saturday carrying babies and parking strollers as middle-class white women pressed ‘Yes’ voting cards into over-full hands.

While ‘Yes’ corflutes were everywhere to be seen, not just at voting places, I didn’t see a single ‘No’ corflute anywhere except at the voting place. Shirts and buttons imploring ‘Yes’ votes were in abundance, but I didn’t see a single shirt or ‘No’ button outside the polling places. Perhaps this was because ‘No’ campaigners, like ‘No’ voters, felt the need to be discreet, were elderly, or coy about their voting preferences. One white-haired ‘No’ campaigner gamely handed out flyers from his mobility scooter while his dog seated beside him.

In Balmain, in the Prime Minister’s seat of Grayndler, just down Victoria Road from Top Ryde, the story was the same… Not a single ‘No’ corflute could be found outside Rozelle Public School during the usual lively Rozelle Markets. There were, however, more well-dressed and well-spoken white people, many with dogs, wearing ‘Yes’ tops and buttons.

You couldn’t help but see how this untimely and unwarranted referendum has brought the cracks and fissures of civil society into the public view.

This buried the notion of ‘we are one but we are many’ and ‘you are, I am, we are Australian’. This referendum demonstrated that the gaps have grown wider, not just in remote and rural committees of both black and white Australians, but between people in our east coast cities.

In the week before the voting started, I sat at an informal lunch table with colleagues, one of whom suddenly commented, ‘It’s migrants, the multiculturals, they won’t vote ‘Yes’.’

All eyes in the group turned towards me – their owners tending to have family names that started with ‘Mac’ or ‘O’, but the speaker was correct. Migrants who have to work harder than most Anglo-Celtic Australia would ever envisage cannot, and should not, be expected to vote for communities however deserving, of which they have little knowledge or understanding. Family comes first, and it always will.

In the hard-scrapple outer western suburbs, as the price of food rises alarmingly and parents have to decide whether the purchase of school shoes can be delayed another term, no one has time or inclination to think about much beyond the next week or the next payday.

Amid all the recriminations, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, two things came together for me from Saturday 14 – the day some commentators are now calling ‘Black Saturday’.

The first was a ‘Yes’-wearing voter who swanned past, deep in conversation with her friend, as she asserted, ‘I just don’t think they should have lit up the Opera House sails in blue and white.’ The second was the elderly Asian man, carrying his grandchild, who, after a quick surreptitious glance around, gave me a quick thumbs up as he walked from the polling place.

Australians need to heal from this division. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long.