The land beneath the memorial carries its own layered history. Multiple iwi occupied the area, including Te Waiōhua and Ngāti Whātua, and in 1840 Ngāti Whātua offered the land to the Crown. Auckland artist Jan Morrison conceived the mural project and approached the Auckland City Council for funding, envisioning a community-led work that would honour the women of northern New Zealand who had driven the suffrage movement. New Zealand was the first self-governing country in the world to grant women the right to vote, in 1893, and Morrison wanted the memorial to reflect that achievement not through marble or bronze but through a form accessible to ordinary people: hand-painted tiles, bright colour, and a design that belonged to the public space rather than to a gallery wall. The result was deliberately democratic, a piece of art made by and for the community.

In 2006, members of Auckland's art establishment argued that the mural lacked artistry and obstructed the view of the newly upgraded Auckland Art Gallery. The campaign to remove it ran headlong into four women whose credentials were difficult to dismiss: Dame Catherine Tizard, Dame Georgina Kirby, Dame Dorothy Winstone, and Dame Thea Muldoon. Alongside the National Council of Women, they argued that the memorial's historical importance was being dismissed in favour of aesthetic preferences. Columnist Brian Rudman captured the conflict in the New Zealand Herald, writing that to the art fraternity, the mural was "a folk-art excrescence, polluting the front door of their newly upgraded temple of high art." An online petition rallied women and organisations across Auckland. The memorial stayed.

Nine years later, the same argument returned in slightly different clothes. In 2015, a group of architects and gallery owners pushed to have the mural relocated, calling it too "folksy" and "crafty" for the approach to a major gallery. The National Council of Women responded through the unitary plan process, petitioning for the memorial to be protected as a heritage item. The campaign succeeded. Khartoum Place was officially renamed Te Hā o Hine, a name gifted by Ngāti Whātua. It references the Māori proverb Me aro koe ki te hā o Hine ahu one, which translates roughly as "pay heed to the dignity of women." The renaming tied the site not just to the 1893 suffrage victory but to a deeper cultural principle, grounding the memorial in both colonial and indigenous histories of women's mana.

In 2022, Heritage New Zealand listed the Auckland Women's Suffrage Memorial as a Category 1 historic place, its highest designation. The listing cited great cultural, social, historic, and physical significance, and noted something remarkable: the persistent campaigns to protect the mural had themselves become evidence of the public esteem in which the artwork was held. The fight to save it had become part of its story. What began as a centenary project, community-funded and community-designed, had evolved into one of the few dedicated suffrage memorials in New Zealand and one of the most defended pieces of public art in the country. The tiles that critics dismissed as craft have outlasted every effort to dislodge them, standing brightly on the stairs where thousands of Aucklanders pass each day on their way to the gallery above.