Early History
The name Tāmaki-makau-rau encapsulates the desirable qualities that have long led to dense settlement in this part of Aotearoa. Fertile volcanic soil, rich fisheries and abundant forests attracted inhabitants as a beautiful person gathered many lovers. Horotiu, in which the present-day Albert Park is situated, was successively inhabited by diverse iwi groups. Occupation included settlement beside the Waihorotiu, in the current Queen Street valley. A small settlement is reported to have been situated on or near the site of the current Auckland Town Hall and George Graham stated that Ngāti Huarere of Te Arawa waka established fortified settlements in the vicinity of Horotiu. Traditions also refer to a waka mooring site and food gathering place at the mouth of the Waihorotiu and the name Te Horotiu Horotiu ‘is said to refer to a settlement which disappeared in a slip during the seventeenth century’ although subsequently utilised by Māori to indicate the wider area. For several generations before the mid-eighteenth century, the land – encompassing nearby pā – was held by Te Waiōhua, a major force in central Tāmaki. After subsequently gaining control, Ngāti Whātua maintained cultivations at Horotiu – including at European arrival. Ngāti Whātua’s offer to transfer a large area of land to the British Crown for a colonial capital at Auckland was formally agreed in September 1840.
Development of Khartoum Place
Khartoum Place may have formed part of the earliest plan laid out for the city of Auckland by Felton Mathew in 1841, occupying a similar position to Russell Place on that plan. An 1866 plan showed the unnamed street as connecting Lorne Street and Kitchener Street, then known as Barrack Street and Coburg Street respectively, and buildings had already been constructed on the neighbouring lots.
The earliest recorded name for the street was Coburg Place after the Royal family. During the First World War (1914-1918) the name was changed to Kitchener Place after the death of Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum and of Broome in 1916. The name was subsequently changed again to Khartoum Place in further reference to Kitchener in 1939.
Initially a wide throughfare up the steep slope towards Albert Barracks/Park, in 1913 a set of steps were created to facilitate pedestrian access. A retaining wall and a u-shaped set of steps with a central landing oriented north-south was built in the centre of the lot creating two levels to connect the adjoining streets, a height of approximately 10m. The two levels of the Khartoum Place became used for car parking by the middle of the twentieth century and by 1968 plans for a redevelopment of the street were being discussed.
In 1983 a four-level concrete water feature and steps were installed in the centre of Khartoum Place, replacing the earlier steps.
Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand
On the 19th September 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country to allow women to vote in elections following a national campaign by New Zealand suffragists including Kate Sheppard and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) as well as other groups including the Women’s Franchise League (WFL), a non-temperance suffrage group. Branches of both groups were established in Auckland and many women from varied backgrounds joined one or both branches. Prominent Auckland suffragists were heavily involved in the campaign locally and as part of the national organisations including Annie Schnackenberg and Amey Daldy who were presidents of the WCTU and Auckland WFL respectively in 1893. Thousands of women, including Māori, from around the country signed petitions which were presented by Sir John Hall to parliament in August 1893. The following month, the suffrage bill narrowly passed into law. The success of the movement was reflected in the 84% of woman eligible to vote registering within six weeks for the bill coming into law. In Onehunga, Elizabeth Yates was elected Mayor of the borough in the 1893 election making her the first female mayor in the British Empire.
As well as campaigning for universal suffrage. Māori suffragists such as Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia, a Te Rarawa wahine of mana from Hokianga, campaigned for Māori women to vote in Te Kotahitanga (unity) Parliament (1892-1902). Mangakāhia, whose husband was the first pirimia (premier) of the parliament, was the first woman to address Te Kotahitanga when, in July 1893, she called not only for the right to vote but also for wahine to stand as members in their own right, a position beyond the aims of the national suffrage movement. Although not immediately successful, wahine Māori were eventually able to vote in Te Kotahitanga from 1897.
Commemorating Women’s Suffrage
Many suffragists continued to push for further women’s rights reform beyond suffrage and formed the National Council of Women of New Zealand (NCWNZ) in 1896 to continue this work into the twentieth century. By the end of the twentieth century the NCWNZ ‘was the largest and most influential women’s organisation in New Zealand.’ Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of second wave feminism saw a renewed focus on advocacy for women’s issues and consciousness raising in mainstream society with campaigns advocating for equal pay and employment, equal rights, maternity leave and the minimum wage act as well as a rise in artistic expression of feminist ideas through art, literature, and drama. The rising consciousness of women’s roles and rights led to dramatic improvement in women’s educational achievement and by 1988 women accounted for 51% of university enrolments, up from 28% in 1966, which contributed to increased scholarship in Women’s History in the late 1980s. The Auckland Women’s Liberation Front pushed for the commemoration of Suffrage Day from 1971 to raise the profile of women’s history which became an annual event. The day was sometimes marked by women’s groups through activist events, and in 1973 the 80th anniversary was commemorated by holding the first United Woman’s Conference in Auckland. However, few public memorials to the events or individual suffragists had been created in the first century of New Zealand women’s suffrage.
The centenary of New Zealand women’s suffrage was widely observed in 1993, possibly reflecting a wider mainstream acknowledgement of the importance of women’s history by the end of the 1980s. Officially designated the ‘Suffrage Memorial Year’, the centenary was marked by nationwide celebrations, conferences, books and memorials. A $5 million trust fund, the 1993 Suffrage Centennial Year Trust/Whakatu Wahine, was established to contribute to commemorations which would “promote public understanding of Suffrage year, […] be of lasting benefit to the community and […] encourage all women to develop their full potential”.
Creation of Auckland Women’s Suffrage Memorial
In preparation for the centenary, artist Jan Morrison’s business Tile Art New Zealand proposed the creation of a mural commemorating the suffrage centenary and approached the Suffrage Centennial Year Trust and Auckland City Council as part the Suffrage Committee for Greater Auckland to secure the required funding. Although the original proposal identified Khartoum Place as a potential location for this civic memorial, alternative sites near Ellen Melville Hall and in Aotea Square were subsequently considered. The Council settled on Khartoum Place which was close to the Auckland Art Gallery and a busy pedestrian route and was the artist’s preferred location.
Auckland Women’s Suffrage Memorial was purposely designed for the space and was created over a period of six months by Jan Morrison and Claudia Pond Eyley in close collaboration, commencing in early 1993. Morrison was an artist with a varied career path based firmly in the arts including activism in environmental and human rights causes and whose work at the time included designing and installing tile murals on the concrete seats along Queen Street in central Auckland celebrating the flora and fauna of New Zealand in 1989. Morrison had co-organised human rights marches in Auckland and across New Zealand during the 1980s in the support of the Human Rights Bill being considered by Parliament. Morrison hired Claudia Pond-Eyley to work with her on the project as a fellow woman artist. Pond Eyley was a prominent Auckland artist whose work had an explicitly feminist perspective. She was a key voice as an artist in the women’s, peace and social justice movements as a founding member of Visual Artists Against Nuclear Disarmament and a member of the Association of Women Artists. Having created other murals around central Auckland including one at the Auckland High Court in 1991 as well as other works in the 1980s and early 1990s, this memorial was created during “one of Pond Eyley’s most productive periods when she was at the height of her artistic powers as a visual artist” and was part of a group of Auckland artists whose work reflected contributed to ‘new understandings of New Zealand’s place in Moana Oceania’. The design and creation of the mural was a successful collaboration between both artists who understood the suffrage movement and were passionately devoted to the message they were trying to convey.
Comprised of 2000 brightly coloured glazed square ceramic tiles and combining the bold colour palettes of Morrison and Pond-Eyley, which has been described as a signature feature in the latter’s work, the design embraced the three-dimensional space of the water feature to create a mural that the public could experience as they walked through the stairs in Khartoum Place with portions of the mural facing different directions and the bulk of the mural traversing the three levels of the water fountain. The process for the creation of the tiles included airbrushing of ceramic glazes prior to firing, and “slip-trailing and silk-screening processes achieved the stencil transference of images”. The mural is believed to have been the first time all three processes were combined at that scale having been previously developed by Morrison and a previous collaborator and was the first time it was employed in a public art space.
Designed to represent the struggles of women, the mural highlights the historical achievement and progress of the suffragists through contemporary techniques and could be seen to raise the potential of what women can achieve in the future. The mural prominently displays the 1893 petition as a scroll across the fountain pools along with iconography and emblems of the North Island and Suffrage, as well as Māori flax kete pattern to represent a weaving together of cultures. The walls beside the steps feature life size images of leading suffragists including prominent Auckland figures.
The individuals featured include:
Amey Daldy (1829-1920) president of the Auckland Women’s Franchise League (AWFL) and who went on to be a driving force in forming the National Council of Women New Zealand (NCWNZ) and was its president in 1898;
Anne Ward (1825-1896) the first President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU);
Lizzy Rattray (1855-1931) one of the earliest women journalists, an elected member of the AWFL, and one of the suffragists who presented the 1893 petition to the House of Representatives;
Elizabeth Yates (1849-1918), first woman mayor in the British Empire;
Annie Schnackenberg (1835-1905) was a founding member and president of the WCTU (1891–1897) and a founding member of NCWNZ;
Matilda Allsopp and Fanny Brown, two of the first seven women enrolled to vote in New Zealand; and
Ada Wells (1863-1933) suffragist and first national secretary of NCWNZ.
A further portion of the mural depicted a flower wreath with names of leading suffragists additionally including:
Elizabeth Caradus (1832-1912) working class suffragist who was a leading figure in the Auckland movement being described as a key member of the WTCU and Treasurer of the AWFL; and
Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia (1868-1920), (Te Rarawa) Māori suffragist, first recorded woman to address Te Kotahitanga Parliament.
A separate portion of the mural showed four women with bicycles which emphasised the importance of bicycles in empowering women in their campaign as they were able to visit outlying areas to gather petition signatures. This section of the mural was added a few weeks after the official unveiling. The use of bright red railings complemented the mural and the lush green plantings were set above the fountain.
The design of the mural has been considered representative of Claudia Pond Eyley’s work which has been described as being ‘characterised by bright colours, dynamically abstracted tropical foliage, and energy’ as well as featuring the ‘lushness of the Auckland landscape’ and being ‘strongly pacific based’, in this mural focusing on Māori influenced motifs which grounds the work in Aotearoa. This work continued her use of art to address important social issues as it ‘celebrates suffrage with [a] bold and unapologetically fresh aesthetic’.
The Auckland Women’s Suffrage Memorial was officially unveiled on 20 September 1993 by the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson and Governor General Dame Catherine Tizard at a ceremony attended by hundreds of women, including descendants of the Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia, only a day after the unveiling of the Kate Sheppard National Memorial in Christchurch on the centenary of New Zealand Women’s Suffrage. The event included speeches at the Town Hall followed by a women’s march to the memorial where a powhiri was held. The mural cost $75000 to complete.
Public Perception and Campaign to Protect Auckland Women’s Suffrage Memorial
Over the following twelve years the Memorial became well known as a landmark in Auckland city. A few years after its creation Lonnie Hutchinson, a Samoan, Māori (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kuri) artist, incorporated the mural as one of three sites across Auckland in a performance art piece to intended to ‘highlight the absence of Indigenous women in both the memorial and in historical narratives about the right to vote’ in which she was bound in packing tape and placed motionless and taped to the mural.
In 2005 Auckland City Council held a design competition to redevelop Khartoum Place and none of the entries, including the winning design, included the retention of the mural. There was a public outcry in response to the proposed designs and, following a public appeal from Morrison for public support to retain the mural, many letters to the editor noted the importance of the mural as a memorial as well as a public artwork that should not be moved from its location in Khartoum Place. Morrison refused to agree to its removal arguing that it would damage the tiles too much for it to be relocated. Further campaigns for its removal were led by supporters of the Art Gallery in 2006 and 2010 who wished to replace it with a grand staircase that would highlight the gallery on Kitchener Street. These attempts were staunchly resisted in a public campaign by interested groups including the NCWNZ, Zonta Club of Auckland, Auckland City Councillors, and a group of Prominent Dames including Dame Catherine Tizard, Dame Georgina Kirby, Dame Dorothy Winstone and Dame Thea Muldoon. The campaigns included rallies in Khartoum Place as well as petitions calling for public support which received 4300 signatures. Te Runanga O Te Rarawa also wrote to the council in response to the proposed the relocation of the memorial in 2010, noting that they are honoured by the inclusion of their whanau Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia as one of only six women named in the mural and that she was a woman of high regard and standing in their iwi.
In 2012 Auckland Council unanimously voted to add Auckland Women’s Suffrage Memorial to the Auckland District Plan as a Category B place and began a $2.2 million upgrade of the site. This included opening up the space further by adding another set of steps at the top of the structure through a blank wall that had no pieces of the mural. Some additional changes which had been made since the memorial’s creation included the removal of plants around the fountain and the replacement of the initial red fencing with a more modern silver coloured fence.
During the creation of the Auckland Unitary Plan in 2015 further attempts to allow for the removal of the Memorial were made. The NCWNZ continued their campaign for the protection of the Memorial and Khartoum Place in perpetuity, contrasting its potential loss to the protection given to war memorials, which mainly commemorated men, and to the loss of another 1993 suffrage memorial in New Lynn which was temporarily removed during a redevelopment of the community building it was installed on but was not reinstated and cannot be found. In the culmination of a decade long public campaign which demonstrated the wide breadth of public support for the place, the NCWNZ were successful in their submission and the entirety of Khartoum Place including the Auckland Women’s Suffrage Memorial was given the highest protection available in the Unitary Plan which recognised its ‘outstanding significance well beyond [its] immediate environs’.
Although it has been critiqued as being “folksy” by opponents, the Auckland Women’s Suffrage Memorial has been credited with being “typical of women’s art, collaborative [and] funded by women” and in recent years it has been noted that the mural “offered an opportunity to redress the imbalance of female to male reminders of heroic or sustained efforts visible in our landscape”.
In 2016 Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei gifted the name ‘Te Hā o Hine Place’ for the lower portion of the street, adjoining Lorne Street. This name is taken from te reo Māori whakatauākī ‘me aro koe ki te hā o Hine-ahu-one’ which can be interpreted to mean ‘pay heed to the dignity of women’ and further confirmed the importance of the suffrage memorial to the place.
Since its creation Auckland Suffrage Memorial has become an iconic part of Auckland and is visited and photographed by tourists as well as being experienced regularly by Aucklanders as part of a busy throughfare connecting the City to Auckland Art Gallery, Albert Park, and Auckland University. It has been the site of official suffrage commemorations on Sep 19 annually and other events including a pay equity rally in August 2017 which was attended and addressed by multiple female politicians.
