Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast Canadian Geographic

"They can't fight if they don't eat."That was the motto of the Farmerettes, the thousands of young women who took the place of male farmers and farmhands who had gone off to fight in the Second World War. While much has been written about the crucial role women played in factories during the war: building tanks, planes, munitions, and weapons of all kinds, etc., the story of Canadian farms, the breadbaskets of the war effort, remains largely untold. In this episode of Explore, we’ll rectify that by diving into the story of the Farmerettes, the mostly high school-aged women who kept Canadian farms running at a critical time.Alison Lawrence’s newest play tells that story at the Fourth Line Theatre and Blyth Festival this summer. Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz is based on personal interviews with Farmerettes as well as letters, memoirs and oral histories. Her play is an intimate look at how that experience was not only transformative for the war effort but for these young women as well. Among the many hats she wears, Lawrence is currently a regular cast member on the Amazon Prime series The Lake and a familiar face on stages right across the country. She’s also the co-author of Bittergirl, the play that became a book, which became a musical, playing off-Broadway, across Canada and in the UK. She’s also a MacDowell Fellow and an alumna of the Banff Playwrights Lab.

Notorious for their seafaring ways and conquering territories far and wide, the Vikings burst onto the world scene around 800 AD. For hundreds of years, they raided, conquered, settled, and farmed in lands across Europe, Russia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and across the North Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland, and then to what they called “Vinland,” our present-day Newfoundland. They did all this in longboats, effectively 60-foot open row boats with sails and virtually no navigation tools. Whatever their legacy of terror (our guest today has some thoughts on that), they were remarkable explorers who left an indelible legacy wherever they went.Vancouver-based author Bill Arnott spent a decade tracing the voyages of the Vikings around the world for his award-winning Gone Viking series. In the best tradition of travel writers like Bill Bryson, Gone Viking takes you to where history happened, full of legends, lore, interesting characters and plenty of humour.The most recent of the Trilogy, Gone Viking III: The Holy Grail, was released in the fall of 2023. Bill Arnott’s writing frequently appears in Canadian Geographic magazine, including recently an excerpt from his newest book, A Perfect Day for a Walk: The History, Cultures, and Communities of Vancouver, on Foot, which will be released this fall. He is also a Fellow of the RCGS sister organization, the Royal Geographical Society.

"You can’t look at a canoe or kayak without grounding yourself in the knowledge that this is a water-craft of Indigenous origin. For us, it’s about honouring the stories, honouring the communities."As The Canadian Canoe Museum (https://canoemuseum.ca/)moves into its stunning new home on the Otonabee River in Peterborough, Ont. on May 11, Carolyn Hyslop and Jeremy Ward, the museum's executive director and curator, drop by Explore to talk canoes.For Hyslop and Ward, every canoe and kayak is special, each has a story worth telling, and a heritage worth preserving. They have devoted decades to building up the world’s premier collection of canoes and kayaks at TheCanadian Canoe Museum and are ready to celebrate the opening of a new home for the museum, a building worthy of the 600-plus water-craft it houses.

"Canada's claim to the Arctic derives from the Franklin expedition and the search that evolved out of it."We’ve touched on the Franklin expedition in several other Explore podcast episodes, so we're excited to be taking the first proper deep dive into the story now with Ken McGoogan, an author who has been passionately writing about this topic for decades. We also discuss Ken’s latest book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, which examines Franklin’s legacy from a contemporary perspective. In the 1800s, Sir John Franklin led two Arctic expeditions 20 years apart, both ending in death and disaster. The second claimed his life along with all members of his Royal Navy crew.In 1845, Franklin set off with 129 officers and men onboard the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. His mission was to find the elusive Northwest Passage, a dreamed-of shortcut from Europe to Asia, through the dangerous sea ice of what is now the Canadian Arctic. Both ships disappeared, seemingly without a trace, and everyone on board perished. It sparked a massive international search and rescue effort, unprecedented in scale and duration.The two Franklin ships were only found on the Arctic Ocean floor in the last decade, 160 years after their embarkment. Their discovery was largely due to Inuit oral history, especially the work of Ken McGoogan’s friend, the late Louie Kamookak, a one-time RCGS Honorary Vice-President.Searching for Franklin focuses on the often overlooked Inuit role in the search for the missing expedition. He also suggests a compelling new theory on why the death toll was so high. This theory echoes an earlier and highly praised Franklin book, Frozen in Time, by our own RCGS CEO, John Geiger. Ken and I begin our chat with the story of John Rae, a great Hudson’s Bay Company explorer and arguably one of the greatest Victorian explorers. He found the first traces of the dead from the Franklin expedition, which had dire consequences for his career.

"Polar Exploration is not for the faint of heart."We're absolutely thrilled to welcome RCGS Fellow Susan R. Eaton to this episode of Explore. Eaton is a well-known polar explorer, geoscientist, educator, and the founder and leader of Sea Women Expeditions (https://www.instagram.com/seawomenexpeditions/?hl=en). In 2015, she was named one of Canada’s greatest 100 modern-day explorers by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and a year later, she was selected by Canadian Geographic as one of Canada's greatest modern women explorers (https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/canadas-greatest-modern-women-explorers/). She was also inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2020. For the past decade, her organization Sea Women Expeditions has led Indigenous and non-Indigenous women scientists, artists, educators, storytellers and more on Arctic sea voyages of discovery. In this episode, we get into a lot of what is involved in this discussion. Our conversation includes swimming parts of the Northwest Passage, diving with orcas and humpback whales, working with Indigenous communities, fundraising lessons from Ernest Shackleton and what she’s learned about the polar seas with the changes brought there by climate change. It ends with a lovely ode to Haida Gwaii.Enjoy!

"I took one step further and we were looking into the eyes of four lionesses and two cubs. The fourth lioness with the cubs exited down the ravine like a shot. The other three lionesses jumped up at us. We ran backwards, yelling at the top of our lungs. The lions came up after us. Their teeth were pulled back in a grimace. The noise was beyond belief."I'm thrilled to have one of Canada's leading naturalists, Brian Keating, join us today. As you can tell from that quote, Brian has had some amazing adventures in some of our planet's most wild and beautiful places. This conversation is a fun ride. We go from his early work at a weather station in the Canadian High Arctic to his travels to Antarctica, sub-Saharan Africa, the Himalayas, and more. There isn't a lot of our natural world that Brian hasn't seen and experienced.Brian’s nearly 30-year career at the Calgary Zoo was split between being the Director of Education and Director of Conservation. For more than 20 years, he taught Anthropology at the University of Calgary. Presently, he’s the owner of goingwild.org (http://goingwild.org/) and co-producer of greatBIGnature.com (http://greatbignature.com/)Brian is a regular guest naturalist on CBC Radio and, for many years, was on the Discovery and National Geographic channels, using much of his own wilderness adventures and wildlife films to tell stories about the value and importance of nature. His constant travel partner is his wife Dee, a doctor, naturalist and also a Fellow of the RCGS.Enjoy the ride!