Hello and welcome to Queer's Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

My name is Eli.

I'm Irene. I'm Alice.

And today we're talking about the British lichenologists and Antarctic explorer Elka McKenzie.

I'd like to acknowledge the Wandrie Wurang people of the Kulin Nation as a traditional

owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay respects to their elders past and

present. We recognize them as the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this

podcast. We have some content warnings before we start this episode.

This episode will contain discussions of transphobia and misgendering in quotes, as well

as brief mentions of wartime bombing, risk of starvation, animal suffering and death,

mental health issues, and a suicide attempt.

If any of that sounds like something that you don't want to listen to, please feel

free to skip this episode and listen to a different one instead.

Just in case this episode sounds a little bit different, we wanted to let you know that we are moving house and the room we're recording in is currently stripped bare of everything that is normally in it.

So we've done our best to strew some blankets around and hope for

the best, but if it sounds a little bit weird, that's why, and it should be sorted out by the next

time. I also wanted to talk about our sources. So frankly, we don't know very much about Elka's

life. Biographical details about her largely come from obituaries published in various scientific journals

after she died. So we have one written by fellow lichenologist George Yano, friend and fellow

polar explorer Andrew Taylor, and Elka's previous grad student, Vernon Imagian. These are people

who knew Elka professionally and to some degree personally, and they seem to be, in the broad strokes, reliable, but there are various discrepancies between these, such as the names of institutions that Elka worked for, the number of children that she had, her birthday, and so forth. So they're certainly not infallible, and they do seem to skew more towards

remembering her professional rather than personal life, as you would expect for the setting in which

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