The images for this week’s Five Minutes of Random (the #RegularRandom challenge) were all shot at Savage Memorial Park on Bastion Point in Auckland.
Savage Memorial is the burial place and monument to Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour Prime Minister — and one of the country’s best loved leaders. He died in office in 1940, having led the government that established our country’s welfare state — now largely dismantled by successive neo-liberal governments.
Tomorrow there will be a general election in New Zealand. Growing inequality, increasing poverty, declining child health and the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world are all issues that have come to the fore in this campaign, and there is real hope that by tomorrow evening we may have a new government. One committed to the values of compassion and justice that informed Savage’s Labour government in the 1930s.
Spring is, after all, the season of hope.
Five Minutes of Random (the #RegularRandom challenge) is hosted by Desley Jane at Musings of a Frequently Flying Scientist.
If you’d like to join in:
- choose a subject or a scene
- spend five minutes photographing it – no more!
- try to see it from many angles, look through something at it, change the light that’s hitting it
- tag your post #regularrandom and ping back to Desley’s post
- have fun!
Your lavender and bee look so very beautiful. Evanescent. A real sense of a new season.
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It was such a joy walking amongst the lavender plants on a sunny afternoon. Short and joyous respite from the rain and a very ugly election campaign!
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Sorry about the ugly campaign. What we need are people with vision, wisdom and a sense of decorum.
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We have a few of those; in the minor parties. The hope is that under our MMP system those parties will get a big enough share of the vote to gain seats.
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❤
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Wow love these. Perfectly captured. I just love lavender.
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Me too. Watching all the bees made me think I should plant some at home.
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I’ve thought about putting some on my balcony.
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No signs of lavender here but its time will come. I only hope Labour’s time has come.
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We’ll know soon I guess.
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Beautiful shots, Su. I love lavender and planted a few plants this year. Several of them did very well, but I may need to move the other two. I also planted a few perennials that look much like lavender and they did very well, so it was a good year for flowers. All the best with the election.
janet
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Thanks Janet. I love having lavender in the garden. We had to uproot ours during our renovations and I’ve been very tardy in planting more. Right season now though 🙂
Happy weekend to you.
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Beautiful captures of the lovely flower; and a lovely message of hope.
Good Election Day to you!
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Thank you so much. This is the first election in a few where real change seems possible, and I’m on a knife-edge.
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Lovely!
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Beautiful flowers. On a random note, my best friend when I was an early elementary school kid is now an MP for the Green Party in New Zealand – it’s a long way from our small town in the States to that!
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Gotta be Julie Ann Genter right! She is amazing — pretty much the only person who talks sense about Auckland’s transport problems. 🙂
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It is Julie! Long after we both moved to new places, we kept up as pen pals – now, we can just see what’s going on via Facebook. Much easier!
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Wow! It really is a small world. I’m so pleased that she made it back into parliament; some of her Green colleagues weren’t as fortunate as the Green vote collapsed a bit. At the moment we have a hung parliament and the awful possibility of “more of the same.” 😦
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Love the lavender and the bee fits in there too.
Please keep us informed as to your election. It’s a small world.
Leslie
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Thanks Leslie. Will do.
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Thanks Su. Kind of nice to know what’s going on there.
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Beautiful pictures. Here’s hoping for a good election result. We need somewhere to vote for something sensible – looking to the first country to give all women the vote!
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Thank you Anabel. It’s 124 years (on Tuesday just gone) since women got the vote here, and it has been a timely reminder of the society we used to be (and perhaps could be again). The election seems too close to call, but it is heartening to know that many young people have registered to vote in the last week alone. My son and his flatmates queued for several hours to to register and cast advance votes.
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I am surprised to see lavender flowering at the beginning of your spring, here it is midsummer before it comes into bloom. Heard on the radio that you got a hung parliament, which never bodes well. Politicians seem so out of step with ordinary people these days and election campaigns get far too nasty and personal each party backstabbing the other, when all we want to know is how they propose to govern the country!
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That’s interesting; most of the varieties of lavender we grow here flow from early spring to late summer.
Yes, the election has left us in a place we’ve been twice before in the last 20 or so years — with the same minor party holding the balance of power. And this has been a particularly vicious campaign, with one of the Green Party co-leaders subjected to a particularly brutal attack for her honesty.
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Can’t like this. I loathe all the nastiness. Trump’s campaign was the vilest I have witnessed and I really hope that doesn’t become the norm.
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We had our first experience of blatant lies and “alternative facts” and it was truly horrific. I read somewhere that people’s views are becoming more polarised, and it is increasingly difficult for many to comprehend others’ beliefs as valid. It doesn’t bode well.
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The word ‘tolerance’ seems to be missing in our vocabulary today.
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Sad but true.
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So pretty.
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🙂
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Love the sound of “Lavender lunch” 🙂 The bees look awfully happy 😉 xxxxx
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