deadcatwithaflamethrower:

recklessprudence submitted:  

God fucking- I just checked, and JK has confirmed there is a wizarding school in Australia. As in, just one. Singular. For the whole continent.

We may not have anywhere near the POPULATION of America, but we are similarly spread out, possibly even worse. HOW does someone who lives in whoop-whoop in the outback get to school? We don’t even do that for our NON-magical schools, there’s the Distance Education program! And we KNOW magical travel has problems with distance, so it’s not like they’re Apparating to school, to say nothing of the fact that there’s NOT going to be a floo network – too bloody hot and/or not enough wood available, almost everywhere I’ve lived. Certain places in the country, yes, but nothing like a country-wide network. So unless there’s enough Portkeys to go around that they can be dropped at properties where there’s a single magical child and they’re the only one for hundreds of kilometres… Trains (for example) take a lot longer to get anywhere, around here. And like you guys, we don’t really have a boarding school tradition, so these kids would disappear from their local schools (which might be the ONLY schools anywhere near them – meaning their parents would seem to be failing in their legally-mandated duty to see that their child is educated up to a certain level) while the parents are still around, with none of their friends able to come over to visit them and no reasonable excuse, which seems to me to be a tailor-made situation for police to rock up with some pointed questions – or if said school is not a boarding school, transportation is even more of an issue, since anything a magical child could use with no adult magicians around could presumably be used by a non-magical, and it would have to be easily reached by said magical child for them to, y’know, use it every school day – or, since the magical kids aren’t isolated for most of the year and still have good relations with their old friends, the temptation to show their friends the cool place they go to school and learn MAGIC would be overwhelming, and eleven-year-olds are not known for having the best impulse control.

And that’s not even starting on the racism problems in this country, which have become less overt in the last few decades (well, except for anyone who looks like they might be Muslim) but are still very present, and what would have happened in the past. The White Australia policy was our federal government’s literal first piece of legislation after federation, and it wasn’t finally struck down until Nineteen-Seventy-Fucking-Three! I can imagine all sorts of problems with racial dynamics in our apparently one and only school!

And what about the First Australians, and our shameful history with them? There were the Stolen Generations, who were ripped from their families and taken to church missions and government institutions and expected to ‘assimilate’, leading to official estimates of anywhere between one in ten and one in three Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children stolen from their parents between 1905 and 1967, with it not finally petering out until sometime in the 70s. Were they forced to go to a European school and learn European wanded magic, instead of their own traditions? Were there teachers there who refused to teach them even that?

Or how about the fact that Rowling has stated European wizards had traveled to Australia and New Zealand and had positive, respectful relationships with the people living there at least a century before Europeans ‘discovered’ them (the old charity textbooks don’t give a timeframe except to say that evidence had to be hidden when non-magicals arrived so they didn’t see depictions of Europeans, but a Pottermore tie-in has Australia as well-known by European wizards in the early 1500s)? Especially when the Statute of Secrecy didn’t go into effect until the 1690s! Are we to understand that European wizards a) didn’t tell their nations about Australia or New Zealand when colonialism and the ‘Age of Exploration’ was in full force for two centuries before Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, or b) were so enlightened compared to those stupid muggles that they didn’t buy in to everything their nations were and believed, even though they wouldn’t separate themselves for another century after Cook hit Australia? And if it’s b, WHY DIDN’T THEY HELP THEIR FUCKING FRIENDS?! First Australians were being slaughtered, and if we go with the ‘enlightened non-racist non-colonialist magicians’ model, then they just sat there on their arses and watched? And that’s assuming they weren’t involved in the ‘taming’ of this ‘savage land’, using their magic against their former trading partners in support of western colonialism!

*pant*

Okay, so this turned into more than just a rant about Australia only having one magical school (which is still fucking stupid, by the way), and more of a ‘Rowling’s worldbuilding breaks down entirely when you look at it (as if you didn’t know’ rant, with a focus on how it sucks related to Australia specifically, but I am still going to submit it. Hope this doesn’t raise your blood pressure too much!