Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has issued a scathing critique of high-profile no campaign figures in the wake of the Voice referendum, for efforts he called "a return to the great assimilation project".

In a piece published by The Guardian on Friday, Keating, who served as PM between 1991 and 1996, accused his coalition successors John Howard and Tony Abbott, alongside Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, of "outrageously and wilfully misinterpreting" the referendum.

He conceded the failed referendum "has ruined the game for the treaty and probably for the republic as well".

Keating said Indigenous Australians "were fighting the wrong fight" by pursuing the Voice to Parliament over treaty.

"Indigenous Australians never needed us to recognise them," he told The Guardian.

"As I told them, yours is a massive and deeply historic problem. Your country was invaded and you were dispossessed of it and many of you were murdered on the way through. You need a political solution, not a legal one; a few rinky-dink legal words in the constitution is not the answer here. The answer is to deal with the history and the forces at hand.

"I have always believed this is their country, they are right to claim the legitimacy of their occupation of it, and wanting to be in the colonial constitution of their colonial dispossessors was, I thought, a capitulation on that point."

Keating's comments echoed much of those made in his landmark 1992 address in Redfern, where he spoke of Australia's continued "failure" to First Peoples, and how their success would represent that of the country's with recognition and reconciliation being crucial.

More than three decades later, Keating questioned going down the legal path through the referendum.

"They were fighting the wrong fight, they should have been fighting about the rightness of their pride as the first people of the country … They should have been fighting for the treaty, the actual issue at hand, not the legal avenues by which they might provide advice," he said.

"Politics is not about dealing with little squares on the canvas, politics is about big brush strokes on the canvas. This is a massive historic problem, it was never going to be remedied by a narrow course of legalism.

According to The Guardian, Keating acknowledged his vies spoke to the support of "black sovereignty as an idea".

Keating extended criticism to the conduct of Abbott, Howard and Blainey within the debate.

Both former PMs had been proponents of the no vote, with Howard labelling colonisations the "luckiest" thing to happen to Indigenous Australians in July.

In his own piece in The Australian last week, Abbott said "If the people's vote is to be respected, it should mean abandoning, or at least scaling back, recent concessions to separatism" like flying the Aboriginal flag alongside the Australian flag and acknowledgment of country ceremonies.

Blainey had said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are "far better off" now than they were in 1788, saying the life expectancy gap still present now is "misleading", via The Australian.

Keating labelled these views as "outrageous extensions of the meaning of the no vote".

"The no vote did not speak to or about these issues, this is just wilful misinterpretation by conservatives of a conscientious vote by the public," he said.

"This is a return to the great assimilation project, and not even a disguised return."

An open-letter from Indigenous yes supporters released after a week of silence following the no vote said the fight was not over.

"We want to talk with our people and our supporters about establishing - independent of the Constitution or legislation - an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to take up the cause of justice for our people. Rejection of constitutional recognition will not deter us from speaking up to governments, parliaments and to the Australian people. We have an agenda for justice in pursuit of our First Nations rights that sorely need aVoice - we will continue to follow our law and our ways, as our Elders and Ancestors have done," it read.

Keating said an established Voice "to put views to government about whatever matters they wish" would only require "a bit of funding from the commonwealth electoral commission to help set it up".