Brian Rudman: Vanishing suffrage mural's trail runs cold

Waitakere City Council's art manager, Naomi McCleary, told the artist the mural would be reinstalled at Kelston Community Centre. Photo / Babiche Martens

If anyone has the huge women's suffrage mural that once graced the south wall of the New Lynn Community Centre hidden away in the back shed, Councillor Cathy Casey would love to hear from you - no questions asked.

Erected in 1993 to mark the centennial of women's suffrage in New Zealand, the eight-panel work seems to have disappeared seven years later without trace. Or, until now, comment.

Which does seem remarkably careless and disrespectful of all involved. Where else in the civilised world would a 4.8m-long painting suddenly evaporate into thin air from a prominent outdoor site in front of the shopping mall.

A probe by Auckland Council officials has drawn a blank.

The council detectives' hypothesis is that it was either destroyed in the 2004 fire at the Corban Estate Art Centre storage facility, or was "lost" during the demolition of the community centre in 1999/2000.

Oddly, Waitakere City bureaucrats seem to have left no records of what was lost in the great Corban fire, or even what was stored there.

No wonder supporters of the sister suffrage centennial memorial in downtown Khartoum Place are so suspicious of offers to remove that colourful tribute to a "better" site somewhere else.

Dr Casey recently went on a nostalgic inspection tour of all the suffrage sites in Auckland she wrote about in her 1995 book, The Suffrage Trail.

That's when she discovered the old community centre demolished and replaced with a new one - but no sign of the mural.

The artist, Sally Griffin, told her she'd been promised that the mural would be removed and resited.

Griffin said Waitakere City Council's art manager, Naomi McCleary, told her it would be reinstalled at Kelston Community Centre - or somewhere else.

The artist says she offered to "refresh it a tad" when it came down, but never heard back.

Last year, before Waitakere City was absorbed in the Super City, Griffin asked what had happened to the mural but got no reply.

Janet Clews, a stalwart of West Auckland local government for nearly 50 years, messaged Dr Casey that the mural was financed by Portage Licensing Trust when she was trust president and "I too was told it was to be placed in safe keeping".

Auckland Council investigators tracked down the project manager involved in the demolition, the old Waitakere City's property manager and Ms McCleary but none of them could help. Various storage facilities were checked but revealed nothing.

You can imagine the trail for a piece of art last seen 50 years ago having gone a little cold. But in this case, we're talking just 11 years. We're also talking of an object - or objects - measuring in total, 4.8 metres long. That's an awful lot of paintings of Kate Sheppard and women on tandem bikes to go missing without trace. If you think you've seen one or more of the panels lurking in a back room somewhere, check out www.sallygriffin.co.nz for an illustration of it.

Griffin was commissioned to do several murals in West Auckland, but recalls the suffrage one as having earned "acceptance on the street".

Graffiti was a particular problem in the area and she says most of her works were tagged except for this one.

"It never got graffitied, which was incredible, even though it was accessible to the bus station."

She's also disappointed council staff showed so little interest in communicating with her about its disappearance - if they even noticed.

She suspects she was the victim of fashion. The "decorative, figurative style" of her work "went out the window" in council circles, to be replaced by "steel object" artworks.

But "all we know is, it ain't there any more".

To me, like the row over Khartoum Place, it's not so much a matter of a fight between art styles as of respect for a memorial erected to honour pioneers who have made New Zealand a better place. To discard a centennial monument to the pioneers of women's suffrage only 11 years after it went up, is just plain disrespectful.

Councillor Casey wants them recreated if the originals cannot be unearthed. She's right.