#stormsnteacups

Athena

Artemis

Hecate

Hestia

Aphrodite

I do not believe this has been asked before of this blog. So far as I know canon says nothing with regards to Australian wizarding education so its basically free-for-all headcanon space. My personal belief is that, as a result of the history of Australia, as well as where is easily habitable, Australian wixes are largely educated in small local schools - the country is too large and the population too spread out around the edges to really host a singular large school that wouldn’t require truly ludicrous travelling requirements. Then again, I guess JKR went and pulled Ilvermorny and Koldovstoretz (for America/Canada and Russia respectively) out of her arse, even given their insane cachement areas so…

There could, by JKR logic, be a single Australian wizarding school. Going by JKR logic its probably located at Uluru/Ayers Rock or some equally culturally appropriative place. But if you want my ideas…

I think that magical Australia is… complicated. Australian Aborigines have been there for years upon years and they have concrete oral records very nearly all the way back. The oral records are so precise and so well-maintained that archaeologists have used them for reference, I say this knowing this because I studied archaeology at uni and Aboriginal knowledge came up during the ethnoarchaeolgy section - you should never underestimate the knowledge of native groups, nor dismiss their knowledge, because if you try to interpret their archaeological history without it my darling you are screwed.

… Sidetracked. Apologies. I have strong feelings about archaeology. Back on topic.

I think that Aboriginal Australian wixes 100% exist. I’ve also headcanoned over on @themonsterblogofmonsters about Aboriginal Australian vampires… sort of. See, all Aboriginal Australian groups are closed cultures, so its generally a bad idea to take anything from their culture for fic purposes. So… I don’t. 

Aboriginal Australian groups have been in Australia for, as I said, years uncounted. Or, to be specific, years counted and so many years it will blow your mind to consider that they have constant and reliable records of it all. Years that, in most western cultures are uncounted. You get me? With that kind of a basis there is literally no way I can conceive of that Aboriginal Australians didn’t have a huge and complex magical culture of their own unless you want to make the hella racist assumption that for some reason they just didn’t have magic or were all killed off. However, HP’verse mirrors our own. Australia is part of the British Commonwealth. And that means one of two things.

Option the first: UK wixes struck some kind of deal with Aboriginal wixes.

I don’t think this is likely. Or well… if it happened, it didn’t last. Native groups are rarely well treated when conquered and what happened to Aboriginal Australian groups was genuinely horrifying - still is, if you look at what Australia’s government is up to. And I don’t think a long established wixen culture would just let their non-magical kin be hurt like that. They’d fight back. They’d help their kith and kin get out, get to safety, set up protections for them and fight back the fuckers who hurt them. The only way we’d get to the Australia we have in our world (remembering that because HP’verse mirrors ours, it has to) is if these groups were utterly utterly wiped out… and I don’t think that matches up well with the narratives that JKR gives us about bigotry being wrong and something to fight back against.

Which leads us to Option Two.

This is what I think is most likely. I think that the Aboriginal Australian wixes took as many of their non-magical kin as they could and went into hiding. We know that magic can fold space, make locations Unplottable, hide things in plain sight with the Fidelius - and these are all Latinate magics, from cultures far younger than that of Aboriginal Australian groups. If they didn’t have their own ways of doing these things then I will punch JKR in the face.

They couldn’t take everyone. Colonisation split up and separated groups, mixed them in disparate groups and divvied them up - there’s no way they could have found where everyone was taken, especially if the magical government was also helping with this, which it well may have. But they would have taken everyone that they could, and hid. 

And when the new western government doesn’t know the magic you’re using, they’re going to have one hell of a hard time finding you. 

I also think that this is what happened with a number of Native American groups. I also don’t believe it is utterly uniform in either case. Some groups kept some tentative contact back - a way to return to help out those of their own that they could, to fight back if they needed to, to maybe emerge again if there was some hope for peace and reconciliation.

So. I think there’s clusters of very small Western-based magical schools in Australia, and I think there are whole settlements of Aboriginal groups hidden in folded space that take in and teach Aboriginal Australian muggle-borns whenever they can. I think there is some very slow re-integration going on, but that it fluctuates with a government that is a piece of shit towards the native groups. 

But I think that a large number - maybe even a growing number - of native wixes hide in folded space, along with any native vampires, who only emerge to help their own and fight off those who might find and attack them. Who’ve made their own space and their own safety and reinforce it as much as they can - and that’d mean that sites sacred to them, such as Uluru, would be rigorously protected from any attempt by colonising wixes to turn it into something so crass and appropriative as a school.

Which thus forces Australian wixes to either have local schools, or a large magical school at a location which isn’t sacred to Aboriginal groups. 

… That was a lot more than I expected to write.