Australia is home to over 1,600 shopping centres, covering more than 26.5 million square metres. We are a nation that love to shop, but times are tough for these aging centres. Online retailers, limited millennial attention spans and old fashioned infrastructure are all putting the squeeze on the mall's market. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the end though, in fact shopping centres are evolving for the future - pulling out all the tricks, enticements and tech they can to ensure you keep spending and they stick around.

Railton is full of topiary with hedges cleverly clipped into animals, words and objects but there are hopes it can reinvent itself and boost its economy like the north-east town of Derby on the back of newly-opened mountain bike tracks.

MORNING BRIEFING: Housing Minister optimistic debt will be wiped, city demands urgent action on climate emergency and councils increase rates.

A man accused of indecently assaulting a child at a Rundle Mall shop is tracked using CCTV and arrested, after police allegedly uncover child exploitation material at his home.

A man whose Subaru WRX was stolen while his five-year-old son was still inside says he was scared for his life but the boy thought it was "just fun".

The US retail phenomenon that prompts bargain-hungry shoppers to stampede through stores is coming to South Australia for the first time, with Adelaide traders allowed to open until midnight on November 29.

Two seven-week-old kittens are dumped in a garden bed at an Adelaide shopping centre, and the RSPCA is seeking help to identify the couple involved.

Robert Irwin comes to the rescue when an echidna waddles into a Sunshine Coast fruit shop and wedges itself under a fridge.

As people look for new ways to cope with the isolation of the coronavirus lockdown, business is booming at adult retail stores around the country.

Creswick's famous woollen mills reopen to the public in time for winter after closing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but they remain closed to tourism for now.

A north-east Victorian alpine village says it will welcome visitors when restrictions allow despite uncertainty whether the ski season will go ahead at all.

A controversial underground coal gasification project could tender for an SA Government electricity supply contract formerly held by a renewable energy project.

Aboriginal traditional owners hit out at legal action launched by residents of a condemned outback town, with one leader saying the argument amounts to the second taking of Aboriginal land.

Outback drillers find water 90 metres below the surface of SA's APY Lands in an underground valley millions of years old and remote communities are hoping it will provide a much-needed economic boost.

Adelaide councils are considering a range of options to address the problem of abandoned shopping trolleys including GPS tracking, locking systems and a bounty for returned trolleys.

The search for four men and a woman missing feared dead after a helicopter vanished from radar north of Newcastle will continue after earlier bad weather halted the operation.

Stories of struggle, the Stolen Generations, mission communities and the death of a traditional language: how would you vocalise three generations of Indigenous history?

The 1-tonne Cessna was lifted nearly 100km by the helicopter.

Where some people have seen wrecked cars in the desert, artists in a remote WA community saw a blank canvas. Rocked by two deaths, the people of Balgo have set about doing something special.

A day after Jody Gore was released from her murder sentence in an act of mercy by the WA Government, she says she hopes her case brings the "silent epidemic" of domestic violence into the open.

One year after the worst disaster to hit Australia's strawberry sector, growers are optimistic about this year's harvest but say they are not out of the woods just yet.

Terry Hodgetts, 80, reckons a lifetime of woodchopping has kept him motivated, and he wants to see more "young ones" get into the sport.

Key's Matchstick Grasshopper

A species of grasshopper that has not been seen in Victoria since the 1960s is rediscovered at Omeo in East Gippsland.

Pusparani Kumaravel has shaved her head after waiting six years for a visa. She feels like it's the only way she can have some control of her life.

Bottle shops in Darwin have eased voluntary restrictions on the sale of cask wine, saying Government policies have made them superfluous. But the move has prompted criticism from police, and a major supermarket giant has already backtracked.

The land of the Alyawarr people in Central Australia has become the unlikely ground zero in the global fight against a crippling medical condition with wicked genetic links.

Tengentyere Council chief executive Walter Shaw says police auxiliaries followed him to a friend's house and then back to his town camp, where he says they pepper-sprayed his dog and searched his car before acknowledging he had no alcohol.

As much of New South Wales continues to battle drought, one Gundagai farmer is counting himself as one of the lucky ones.

An Irish family, at risk of being deported because of their son's cystic fibrosis, has been given renewed hope with the news that their case will be reviewed.

Farmers Stephen Black and Melissa Portingale were so desperate for water they put a rare ooshie up for sale. That's when the trouble started.

Before he retires, Bishop John Parkes in north-east Victoria is pushing for same-sex marriages to be blessed by the Anglican Church.