It was a republican sausage sizzle which yesterday managed in a small way at least to put some steam back into the sagging campaign to replace Britain's Queen Elizabeth as Australia's head of state.
The free bangers at a harbour park might have been barbecued by leading Australian cook, Ms Margaret Fulton, but it seemed to be the prospect of changing to a president which drew a small lunchtime crowd into the spring sunshine. It was a genuine community event, as opposed to media occasion.
"I want the kind of president who's a hero kids can aspire to," said one man. "I've never met anyone who wanted to be the governor general."
It might have been a passing symptom of what the republican camp cautiously describe as a late swing. According to the opinion polls, it will certainly need it. Ms Fulton, whose cookbooks have sold around the world, said she remained optimistic as she was originally a Scot and thus had to have a cheerful view of life.
Standing quietly eating her sausage sandwich was an elderly Aboriginal woman, who knows more than most about getting notoriously difficult tricky referendum questions past a generally conservative electorate.
In the 1960s, Ms Faith Bandler was leader of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and managed to push through a historic referendum in 1967 which ultimately gave indigenous people the vote. She is in favour of the republic, but fears it is unlikely to be voted in.
"People stay with what they know. There's a terrific fear of the unknown out there," she told me. "Most of the older people say they'll vote No because they don't know what they'll get."
Republican campaigners, she said, should have visited factories, community groups and churches instead of relying on media events and celebrities to spread their message.
Until yesterday, Australia's original inhabitants were largely absent, to this reporter's eyes at least, from a campaign which could change their country forever.
Then Australia's second only Aboriginal federal MP made an unlikely intervention to highlight an overlooked part of the vote, which has divided the black community almost as bitterly as have the issues separating monarchists and republicans.
Although they are of rival parties and disagree on the republic question, Senator Aden Ridge way joined monarchist Prime Minister John Howard, in an effort to breathe life into a few words which celebrate his people and Australianness. There are two questions 12 million Australians have to decide on Saturday.
The first is whether a president should replace the British monarch as head of state, and the second concerns the seemingly innocuous matter of a preamble to the constitution. It is Mr Howard's pet project and aims to give official recognition for the first time to Aborigines, as well as to migrants, men and women and to the spirit of Australia.
His plans to include the term "mateship" were torpedoed by feminists, but it has offended many people, including Aborigines like Ms Bandler, who are opposed to the PM's decision to drop the words acknowledging Aboriginal "custodianship" of the land and replace them with the more neutral description of "kinship" with the land.
It's been called a sell-out and a lie by Aboriginal groups, who want to boycott the preamble now in the hope to getting a more generous wording in a later revision. Controversially, the senator has agreed to back Mr Howard to try and push the change through, which the PM said focused on expressing what unites Australians as opposed to divides them.
"For too long we have existed as a country which is no more than an annexe to a British act of parliament," said Senator Ridge way. "It's high time that through the preamble and perhaps through the question of the republic that we deal with some of the unfinished colonial business of our past."
However, if the swing has come too late and the pundits are correct then apathy, caution, fear and conservatism will banish both the republic and the preamble to the wastepaper basket of history.