NZ Visual Diary - entry 454

movement & colour - Khartoum Place

There are many paths I could take to get from my apartment in the Wynyard Quarter precinct of Auckland’s city centre to the Auckland Art Gallery at the corner of Wellesley Street East and Kitchener Street, a distance on foot of 2km. With deliberate consistency, I elect to traverse the path that takes me across High Street to Lorne Street and then through Khartoum Place.

This premeditated route speaks to a deeply held belief of mine that a walk ought to embrace purpose and significance beyond physical exertion. It should command the senses, and foremost among them for a photographer: what might be seen.

For me, Khartoum Place is the stuff of a pilgrim’s journey for a three-fold reason, at once personal, civic and visual. With regard to the personal, my wife completed her academic training in the discipline of history, and specifically as a student of the 19th century American South. Her dissertation examined the remarkable life of Margaret Wickliffe Preston as recorded in the voluminous family papers housed in the Special Collections of the University of Kentucky Library.

The preparatory work to celebrate properly the centennial of the passage of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution — the amendment that extended to women the right to vote in all elections, local and national — promoted her to refocus her work from the antebellum South to the Reconstruction Period of the latter 19th century and to what many historians refer to as the Second Reconstruction of the 20th century.

With our emigration to New Zealand in 2018, Randolph cemented her scholarly focus on the unique women’s suffrage history of her adopted country. In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant to women the right of universal suffrage, the power by parliamentary act to vote in all public elections. And that singular fact of world history brings me to the second fold of a pilgrimage to be understood in 3 parts.

Khartoum Place is the home of Auckland's Women’s Suffrage Memorial. I have previously posted about the Women’s Suffrage Mural at Khartoum Place. Suffice it to say here, I pause in a reverent moment to think about the extraordinary struggle that led to universal suffrage in New Zealand and to the pride I hold for the scholarly work that Randolph continues to contribute to our understanding of that history.

Finally, there is the photographic - a captivating visual celebration that architects and artists brilliantly captured in form, line and colour. With my photograph, taken from the stairs that lead from Kitchener Street to the Lorne Street plaza, I have attempted to capture the architectural beauty of the memorial plaza.