[6] McKern attended primary schools in Summer Hill and Ashfield before commencing study aged 11 at Newington College.
[9] At the University of Sydney in 1908 he was an undergraduate in the Department of Mining Engineering and won the Levy Scholarship for Chemistry and Physics.
In the Centenary Edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales he wrote a major treatise on Conservation in Australia.
[13] McKern died in Sydney and an obituary was published in the September/October 1975 issue of The National Parks Journal.
[14] He was survived by his son Howard McKern Deputy Director of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and President of the Royal Society of New South Wales.