Fabulous fiction: Currawalli Street by Christopher Morgan
Always there has been this funny little hill. Always there has been a crooked path of some sort running along its crown. Sometimes it could not be called a path; sometimes it was just a break in the growth of the tree trunks where the wind had pushed them aside when they were saplings, like the part in a head of hair, for the wind always liked to run up this rise and sail over the crest; and it has always been a place to stop and be still for a moment. Wallabies climbed the gentle slope to reach the top and always looked around, for it was a good place to see if safety was still a companion. Dingoes used the top of this slight hill to look back down the track in case there was anything small thinking it was safe to move. Kangaroos looked about from this spot to decide which way to go next; men stood here and looked for where there might be shelter. It isn’t a big rise, not really a hill, but the illusion of height is fundamentally important to all animals.
Now there is a gravel road running east to west where the track once was, but the rivulets that the rainwater makes in the gravel look exactly the same as when there were only tree roots and branches bending in opposite directions in that spot. At the crest where the break in the vegetation was and where animals stopped to look about, there now is a church. Its spire is higher than the currawalli trees, even though some of them are two hundred years old. The gravel road is called Currawalli Street.
