With any overseas adventures off the table for a while, Australians will be dreaming of escaping the shutdown and heading out for a holiday. Here's how every state and territory plans to get people travelling again.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian will announce the plan to start relaxing lock down restrictions from Friday, but local and regional travel is not yet back on the menu.

A powerful cold front brings strong northerly gusts and heavy rainfall to much of southern Western Australia, damaging homes, leaving more than 35,000 properties without electricity and washing up yachts.

Environmental groups have called for greater transparency about the potential health impacts of Australia's largest onshore liquified natural gas plant as residents say their complaints are ignored.

The January deadline is looming for the shipping industry to clean up its act on reducing air pollution as vessels across the world will be required to use low-sulphur fuel oil.

Drought sees Pilbara stations sell off their entire herds, but this manager says it's not the end.

An online petition and Facebook page to negotiate better deals on high-cost airfares for regional West Australians is gaining traction.

NASA and European Space Agency scientists are in remote Australia learning about the origins of life on Earth, and it's all to prepare for "the greatest treasure hunt ever" the next mission to Mars.

A tiny male marsupial dies in the wild after "intense" mating and not from the harsh, arid environment in which it lives, research confirms.

Once the scene of entrenched, intergenerational alcohol abuse, a historical hotel in WA's remote Pilbara region is now a symbol of hope and cultural pride.

Cancer patients in the remote Pilbara will soon be trialling chemotherapy via video link, saving them a 1,500-kilometre trip for life-saving treatment.

A measles outbreak in Perth's south spreads to Western Australia's mining industry after a fly-in, fly-out worker for Fortescue Metals Group is diagnosed in the Pilbara.

A Pilbara man is granted bail after allegedly being found with more than 40,000 child exploitation images following a sting by authorities in the United States.

A 37-year-old woman is in custody on charges of murder and attempted murder after a fatal head-on collision in Western Australia's north-west.

A well-known WA pastoralist is jailed for almost four years for causing a crash on a remote Pilbara highway that claimed the lives of a couple and left their two children orphaned.

When the hype around 3D printing was at its peak, it was confidently predicted that every household would soon have a personal printer. That’s not the way it turned out. But 3D printing is coming back and it’s slowly making its way toward the verdant “plateau of productivity”.

Desertification and land degradation affect the lives of around three billion people, according to UN estimates. Two ambitious projects aim at halting desertification and returning soil to productivity: the Great Green Wall project in northern Africa; and the Green Great Wall initiative in China.

It’s a scarce resource and likely to get even more so. But is it causing an increase in political friction? The answer is yes… and no.

The hope of nuclear fusion is the dream of a fossil-fuel free future - of limitless baseload power. Enthusiasts say fusion offers all the benefits of nuclear energy without the dangers. In theory and in practice fusion energy is already a reality, but getting the economics right is proving much more difficult than imagined.

MIT research scientist, Andrew McAfee, argues we need to rethink our assumptions about capitalism and the environment.   Economic growth, he says, has been gradually decoupling from resource consumption. So, if capitalism survives this current crisis, we may need to adapt our understanding of the way it all works.  We also hear from Annmaree O’Keeffe, from the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Program, about the value of Australia’s international public broadcasting effort now that the Pacific is once again an Australian geopolitical focus.

Four parachutists were forced to make an emergency jump from a light plane over a popular skydiving region south of Adelaide earlier this year when the engine cut out, according to an Australian Transport Safety Bureau report.

The Roosters entrench themselves in the top four with a win over the Bulldogs at the SCG after Manly defeats the Dragons at Brookvale.

The Giants move up to second, denying the Kangaroos a third-straight win under caretaker coach Rhyce Shaw with a victory in Hobart.

Gold Coast junior Riley Parsons shares his love of cricket, by refurbishing old gear to give to kids who need it.

Elite women's tennis will return to WA at least one more time after Perth was chosen to host the final of the Fed Cup competition in November, beating bids from Melbourne and Brisbane.

This kangaroo species normally lives high in the treetops but is now being found in odd places, unable to see and confused, and one ecologist is trying to find out the cause.

Brumbies star Christian Lealiifano will retire from Super Rugby at the end of the season, taking up a lucrative offer to play in Japan.

A tiny number of performers worldwide stuff their adult frames into cannons, to be shot across an arena at 60 kilometres per hour. Queenslander Warren Brophy is one of them.

The WA Attorney-General casts doubt on whether more than $600,000 worth of severance payouts, made to former Health Department employees embroiled in a decades-long corruption scandal, will be recovered.

A South Australian judge has given a stark warning to a street-level drug dealer about the horrors of ice, saying it causes people to snap in bars, coward punch strangers, neglect their children and even kill.

The father of missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez travels to Australia to give an emotional press conference where he promises to bring his son, who has been missing since May 31, home.

WA's Chamber of Commerce and Industry releases a damning assessment of newly-elected Opposition Leader Liza Harvey's economic policies, saying they put the state's budget repair at risk.

A self-described online news service operator who admitted to duping a woman out of $5,000 in Tasmania is wanted on similar allegations in South Australia, a court hears.

The Victorian branch of the CFMEU threatens to immediately cease all financial support for the ALP if Labor leader Anthony Albanese's push to expel union leader John Setka goes ahead.

The AFL's supporter crackdown is being felt by those in the stands, but without confirmation one way or another from the AFL, the supporters are filling the void with questions of their own.

Laurent Hayez, father of missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez, supported by his sons Godfather JP Hayez and cousin Lisa Hayez.

Harry Bowman has been the face of the Top End's crocodile cruises for more than 30 years, but the time has come for him to say farewell to his toothless old mate Brutus the giant saltwater croc.

A South Australian farming community has been given a much needed psychological sweetener after a heavy downpour fell in a matter of hours the first good rain in three years.

The 2016 killing of a Canberra man is portrayed as a "cold-blooded plan", designed to silence him over an earlier machete attack, on the first day of an ACT Supreme Court trial.

MORNING BRIEFING: Today's State Budget will include funding for extra teachers, health workers and police as well as a public transport boost, while the homicide squad is investigating the death of a woman who was found on a Sydney footpath.

The crown alleges Mark Jones waterboarded Bradley Breward with a hand towel, by placing it over his face and pouring water over it, and also put a plastic shopping bag over his head twice for 40 seconds each time.

The biggest league match of the year rolling into Perth this week will inevitably trigger discussions about whether WA should have its own NRL side, but that decision depends on something far more important than crowd sizes, writes Tom Wildie.

People undergoing genetic testing will have more certainty about whether the variants in their genes risk causing cancer or are completely harmless, after a new international study.