Do you really have to make Australia even scarier? Damn it people!

 

How about some from medieval and modern literature? The Seely Wight for example, is a hobgoblin somewhere in between a house elf and a goblin, with the small body and friendly, albiet troublesome, nature of the former and the occasionally greedy, grudge-holding characteristics of a HP goblin. Seelies that are mistreated turn into Boggarts, and that's an easy way to introduce them into Harry Potter.

I've always wanted to see a bit more 'fairy' interaction in fanfiction. There's a lot of potential with doxies, boggarts and such, and if someone chose to write a story about that world, I would certainly give it a chance. It would almost demand a Luna/Harry pairing, but I digress...

As for monstrous beasts: sea monsters, dragons, minotaurs, cyclops, centaurs.

You could easily start a story about Harry going down in the second task and glimpsing a mermaid of tremendous beauty, but being too busy to investigate. Later on, he comes back to take a further look at the mermen colony, interacting with her and slowly learning the language -- with tips from Dumbledore even. He finds out about a sea monster that kills virgin mermaids (like the one he has his eyes on) and he sets out to kill it with unexpected help from the giant squid. How bad ass would that be?

Harry and Ron could visit Charlie in Romania post-Hogwarts around the same time a massive never-before-seen dragon starts picking off the runts (twelve-foot tall runts, but still) and they're forced to defend the others from the back of a dragon themselves.

There's a lot of potential, and anything could work if done properly with a sufficient backstory to make it realistic. Harry goes to Egypt with the Weasley's and is locked in a room with a thousand runespores. The basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets had eggs, and before he leaves Hogwarts, they begin petrifying students once again.

Start writing people!

 

A Monster Hunter/Harry Potter crossover?

DO IT.

 

I've always wanted to see a HP fic where Harry and Hagrid go on adventures and discover/fight/kill/eat/save rare magical creatures.

 

What we need is moar snake. But not just any old poisonous forked tongued reptile will do. It needs to have the most highly neurotoxic venom in the world. And then we give it the temperament to stalk and kill human beings - the honey badger of the magical snake world. And then we'd... waitaminute. Australia already has this.

Back to the drawing board.

 

give it a pair of Jet engines.....

 

Brain snake. It slithers inside your ear while you're sleeping and slowly eats your brain.

 

A wizarding plague that spreads by apparition.

Once you're infected it breeds magically fast. The individual bacteria (or whatever) behave a bit like Google spiders. Every time they split to reproduce, there's a chance they will use their apparition ability to jump to a nearby location, with a particular predilection for uninfected people. The symptoms are a bad flue, which can occasionally be lethal but seldom is. Once your body's immune system has beaten it, you're immune to that particular strain.

The typical pattern goes like this. The infection will start with a few isolated cases. Wizarding authorities will try to contain it but this seldom works. If they fail, it will blitz across the land, infecting nearly everyone who doesn't hunker down within anti-apparition spells (sealed buildings work best for this, since it can infect from jumping into nearby air). After a few weeks, it will burn out. Everyone will be immune. It will then be at least another generation before the next flare up.

Where it comes from is a mystery. Theories range from ancient plague artefacts, to hidden magical creatures to terrorist wizards. Needless to say, there is a lot of gold in it for anyone who can figure out the mystery.

 

An anti-magic, armoured hide, toxin-immune wombat. In essence, a large, furry mobile brick that kills those that intrudes into its burrow by crushing their skulls between the ceiling of their burrow and their arse. Vehicles cannot lay them low, they laugh at projectiles and consider magic and venom a pleasant massage.

 

There's a few snippets of a monster hunter Harry who tracks down rare animals for their ingredients. It think it's in Rorshach's Blot's Odd Ideas, and there's probably a half dozen of them. They were some of the better chapters in there if I remember.

 

The Burrunjo. Its like an Aussie version of the Chupracabra, except it looks like a T-Rex.

You could also take myths from nearby islands. Like the Orang Bati, which are blue, winged, child-eating apes from Indonesia. Or the Aswang from the Philipines. Can't go wrong with a creature that shapeshifts from beautiful woman to grotesque, man munching she-bitch who then leaves behind a wooden homunculus of its prey.

 

I'm not very creative and so won't be able to top the dick parasite in the first post. However there are some really interesting bits in Maori folklore about myths and cryptids that you might be able to integrate into your own work:

Patu-paiarehe are tiny redheaded faeries that live in the mountains and mostly keep to themselves unless you forget to pay your proper sacrifice to the forest gods. In that case you could have a "plagues of Egypt" type situation occur - I find epic scale, potential-apocalypse types of natural disasters to be effective horror.

Whaitere is a stingray that gained magic powers after her parents are murdered by fishermen and she visits them in the underworld. She becomes gatekeeper of the two worlds and has the ability to grant wishes if she so chooses. In the myth she convinces the people to respect the land and live happily ever after, but that's no fun. Maybe have her feeding on human/merpeople children in order to maintain her powers or something.

Kurangaituku is a 20 ft tall bird-woman living in the forest. Hatupatu and Kurangaituku is kind of a David and Goliath tale where chief Hatupatu is kidnapped and held as a pet by Kurangaituku but escapes across a hot spring while Kurangaitu is scalded and dies chasing him. You could write it as a tribe of terrifying Giant/Veela hybrids, which could actually be pretty funny.

Orang-bati is a flying monkey/bat creature that supposedly snatches human children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsupial_lion ... presented without comment.

If you run out of ideas, taking any plant and making it outright carnivorous is always a good standby. :awesome

 

A honey badger. That eats basilisks.

 

I feel like they'd do that anyway.

 

The Firefox.

A magical relative of the red fox that lives in, and starts, forest fires. During the summer it marks out a territory about 100 miles long and magically sets those markings on fire. It feeds on the ash left over by these fires. During the winter months it travels throughout the Australian floo network, harassing travellers and scavenging for the best fireplaces.

The Australian ministry has attempted on many occasions to prevent the Firefoxes from reaching the floo network, but even the enhanced security spells around floo capable fireplaces have failed. Some magical researchers theorise that the Firefox uses the last forest fire of the summer to transport themselves into the network, but there is little evidence to prove this due to the already magical nature of the fires.

 

The deadliest magical creature in Australia is Australia itself. It doesn't like us, and it's been feeding on us for millennia.

 

The Black Dingo.

Larger relative of the dingo that travels and hunts by sinking or leaping into one shadow and coming out of any other in its vicinity.

 

Its preferred meal is babies.

 

A variation of the Dementor, it picks a victim which is alone and floats silently behind it's head, always moving perfectly synchronous with head movements. The draining of emotions and eventually the soul is not noticeable by the victim, only others may notice changes in behaviour. The longer this goes on, the stronger the being becomes. At first it alters the perception of the victim and can't be seen in mirrors, later it can even manipulate other people who are looking at it's prey. The patronus is effective, but first the threat has to be recognized. If it has decided on a victim, it may also return after being driven off.