Brian Rudman: Council looks overseas for advice on Khartoum Place mural

Talk about not listening. Auckland City's response to the furore over the proposal to remove the suffrage centenary memorial from Khartoum Place is to hire an Australian "object conservator".

But the expert's job will not be to advise on conserving the memorial at all. Not in situ anyway.

The assignment is to come up with a way of removing intact the 2000 ceramic tiles that decorate the structure, so they can be remounted elsewhere.

The decision to bring in an overseas expert follows comments yesterday by monument creator Jan Morrison, and Khartoum Place redesign architect Kevin Brewer, that removing the tiles would be unrealistic as too many would break.

But whether they can be removed without damage is hardly the point if no one wants them to go. And that's the feedback from Aucklanders after yesterday's story.

Like the depressing saga of Greer Twiss' albatross sculpture down on the waterfront, which Bernard Orsman catalogues elsewhere in today's Herald, these are examples of what happens when one hand of the city has no idea what the other is doing.

I always steered clear of the 1970s buzzword "holistic" at its peak, but I can't help thinking we citizens might be a lot better off if the council flushed the V words, like vibrant and visionary, down the dunny and substituted a few holistics instead.

Holistic as in "dealing with or treating the whole of something or someone and not just a part".

With Khartoum Place, the challenge, as described in the council's newsletter City Scene of July 24, was to refurbish it as "a key pedestrian link between Lorne and Kitchener streets, arts galleries and Albert Park".

It was to be designed in an "inviting and user-friendly way" in conjunction with "the planned $90 million redevelopment of the Auckland Art Gallery".

A shortlist of 12 architects competed for the assignment, the city's brief not mentioning the retention of the $75,000 suffrage memorial, installed and part-paid for by city ratepayers, 12 years earlier.

The emphasis was on pedestrian "flow", to the art gallery entrance.

The poor old memorial didn't get a look-in. The fact that some of the city's art pooh-bahs sniffily dismiss it as "bad art" no doubt didn't help.

A holistic approach would have called for a consideration of Khartoum Place's other functions. As the home of the memorial for one.

A holistic approach might have also saved them from a bigger so-called obstacle to "flow" than a colourful tiled mural of old-fashioned sheilas on bikes. I'm talking of Kitchener Street's recent conversion into a motorway off-ramp.

You would have thought when the experts sat down to discuss pedestrian flow up Khartoum Place and across Kitchener St to the newly expanded art gallery that one of those invited would have been a traffic engineer. But it seems not.

So the traffic engineers sat in isolation and decided to divert all traffic spewing out of the Wellesley St underpass into the city, either left along Mayoral Drive or right into Kitchener St past the art gallery.

So much for pedestrian flow through Khartoum Place when everyone comes to a grinding halt while city-bound cars stream past just short of the gallery.

But back to the memorial. City officials are now saying no decisions have been made. But the whole paper trail indicates that retention was the last thing on anyone's mind.

Jan Morrison spoke to me on Wednesday about the pressure she's been under to agree to its demolition.

And of the search for sites to build a new memorial elsewhere.

She said she felt isolated and appealed for public reaction.

It's come, and it's unanimously for leaving the memorial as it is. With a good clean-up thrown in.

Instead of wasting money for overseas advice on how to dismantle the structure, the city should use it to pay for some detergent and a scrubbing brush.

If it's too gloomy, as they say, then trim the trees and add some better lighting. If the homeless sleeping there upset some, then build them a shelter elsewhere with some of the budgeted $2 million.

Just 12 years ago it was hailed a cheerful, welcoming, celebratory corner of the city.

What's changed that a spring clean wouldn't fix?