Last train to Hogwarts

Harry Potter fan Erica Crombie. Photo: Meredith O'Shea Harry Potter has been a central figure in the lives of many young people and the boy wizard will be sorely missed. WHEN Erica Crombie's parents bought her a book about wizards and magic to help alleviate the boredom of a wet week in a Queensland holiday park, little did they know what they'd let themselves in for. Between the rather ordinary covers lay a story so compelling and addictive, it drew the nine-year-old into a parallel world where she would spend the next half of her life. From the time she turned the first page and met Harry Potter crouching in a cupboard under the stairs at No. 4 Privet Drive, the young Crombie was hooked. What followed was a decade of adventure in which she spent close to $20,000 on Potter paraphernalia and trips to America and Canada for academic conferences, where lecturers gave earnest talks entitled ''Not Just Good and Evil: Moral Alignment in Harry Potter'' and ''Bloody Hell! Why Am I So Wild About Harry?'' Advertisement: Story continues below Adam Shelley and Aleysha Vanheusden - grown up Harry Potter fans. Photo: Craig Sillitoe On July 13, the second part of the seventh and final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will be coming to a cinema near you. ''It all ends,'' say the posters ominously and they are not wrong. But for the legions of fans across the globe who have grown up with Harry, it is not just the end of the series, it's the end of their childhood. Like Harry, they have come of age and are entering the workforce or university. In the immortal words of Corinthians, it is time Rosetta Stoneto ''do away with childish things'', which means they should, by rights, be consigning their pointy hats, wands and wizard garb to the bin-liner meant for the nearest op-shop. ''It's time to grow up,'' concedes Adam Shelley, 20, from Coburg. ''But I don't think I can imagine my life without Harry.'' Diehard fan Erica Crombie saved money from her after-school job to finance her attendance at a Harry Potter symposium in Las Vegas. Photo: Craig Sillitoe I meet Shelley, who works for Gold Buyers Australia, and his equally Potter-mad friend Aleysha Vanheusden, 20, not surprisingly at Flinders Street Station. (She is wearing a Gryffindor scarf as a means of identification). Over mugs of hot chocolate in lieu of steaming butter beer, I ask the million-dollar question: what is it about Harry Potter that's so appealing? Both struggle to capture the magnitude of their feelings with mere words. ''It's the whole story of a boy being treated horribly by his adopted family and then discovering there's a world out there that's bigger and better. It's about finding yourself, about discovering that you are needed. It's so hard to explain,'' says Shelley. The childhood fantasy, where you imagine the dreary adults you're stuck with are not your ''real'' parents - who are, like Harry's true parents, just amazing - is a recurring theme in children's fiction (think how happy the Ugly Duckling was when he discovered he was of a more noble lineage). Freud called it ''the family fantasy'' and while its purpose is complex, he believed it helped children cope with the disappointment they felt towards their own rather boring parents, and the inevitable separation from them. And where better to embed a story about separation than in the English boarding school?

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