To your right, you will see a tiered pedestrian plaza defined by a long flight of stone steps and a vibrant, multi-colored tiled mural wrapping around a central water feature, all sheltered by mature trees.
This stepped layout is actually the result of some aggressive Victorian engineering. Back in the eighteen-seventies, this area was a steep, rugged hillock known as Coburg Street. City commissioners decided it was too difficult to navigate, so they ordered massive earthworks to essentially slice the hill down, smoothing the terrain into the terraces you see now to prepare the site for the Art Gallery above.
The name of this place has shifted just as much as the earth itself. It was originally Coburg Place, but during the intense anti-German sentiment of World War One, the city erased the German royal name "Saxe-Coburg." They renamed it Kitchener Place after Lord Kitchener, the field marshal famous for his military campaigns in Sudan. In nineteen-thirty-nine, it became Khartoum Place, doubling down on the military theme. It is a bit rich, really. For decades, a square named after a hyper-masculine war hero has served as the primary memorial for New Zealand's women's suffrage movement.
That colorful artwork is the Auckland Women's Suffrage Memorial. Designed by Jan Morrison and Claudia Pond Eyley, it was unveiled in nineteen-ninety-three to mark one hundred years of women having the vote. The unveiling was... let's call it chaotic. The Royal New Zealand Air Force had suspended a massive cargo parachute over the square to hide the work for the big reveal. But just as the Irish President Mary Robinson was waiting to speak, artist Claudia Pond Eyley was frantically rushing around inside the fountain, wiping visible marker-pen numbers off the tiles seconds before the water was turned on.
If you look closely at the mural, find the "bicycle women" panel. It depicts suffragists cycling to collect signatures for the eighteen-ninety-three petition and features the face of the artist's own great-grandmother. The bicycle was a major tool of emancipation, allowing women to travel independently to outlying areas to canvas for votes.
You might assume a monument to civil rights would be safe here, but in two-thousand-and-five, the City Council effectively tried to bulldoze it. They held a design competition for a two point two million dollar upgrade, and shockingly, not a single finalist design kept the memorial. The "high art" critics were brutal. One commentator, Hamish Keith, called this mural a "makeshift urinal" and a "sordid blot." Another proposal even suggested relocating the mural to the entrance of Myers Park, directly next to a notorious brothel.
They picked the wrong fight. A "feisty fightback" was led by four formidable women, all titled Dames, including Dame Catherine Tizard. The artists refused to back down, and the controversy raged until two-thousand-and-eleven, when the Council finally admitted defeat and protected the memorial as a "national treasure." In two-thousand-and-sixteen, the lower section was rightfully renamed Te Hā o Hine Place, which comes from a whakataukī-or Māori proverb-meaning "pay heed to the dignity of women."
It took over a century, but the geography and the history finally match up. When you are ready to move on, we will head toward the theatre district.
