Q&A
SIT DOWN WITH
David Fricker Interview with the Director General, National Archives of Australia
RIMPA’s Chair, Thomas Kaufhold, took the opportunity to speak with David Fricker about the highlights and challenges during his 10-year term as Director General at the National Archives Australia, and about his future plans moving forward. 8 | iQ December 2021
TK: After a decade as head of the National Archives what do you see as the highlights for the Archives and areas where more could have been done? DF: A definite high point for me was the Adelaide Tandanya Declaration. The Declaration was made when the International Council on Archives and the National Archives hosted the international ‘Indigenous Matters Summit, See Us, Hear Us, Walk with Us: challenging and decolonising the archive’, at the Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, in Adelaide in October 2019. The Declaration was the product of a great deal of collaboration across the membership of the International Council on Archives, drawing specifically on the experience and knowledge of first nations archivists, including our own Phyllis Williams PSM from the National Archives. The Declaration sets forth a list of commitments for all jurisdictional archives to embrace Indigenous worldviews and methods of creating, sharing and preserving valued knowledge; to
