Sydney - Australia's economy is growing at a quarter of the rate of a year ago, sparking fears that a global top performer has joined a slowdown evident in most of the rest of the developed world.

In the three months through the end of June, the gross domestic product (GDP) rose 0.3 per cent, figures from the Bureau of Statistics released Wednesday showed.

It was the slowest GDP growth rate in three years. The culprit was a sharp drop in household consumption, underlined by a 10-per-cent decline in car sales.

Credit growth was the lowest in 20 years with many households hard hit by petrol price increases and trouble keeping up with mortgage payments.

Sydney  - An Indonesian man was jailed Tuesday for his part in bringing 300 illegal immig

Sydney - Just touching a didgeridoo could make a woman infertile, an Aboriginal academic said Tuesday when calling for a ban on a book encouraging girls to take up the wind instrument.

Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, said the Daring Book for Girls was blasphemous and should be pulped because in Aboriginal culture only men were allowed to play the didgeridoo, a hollowed-out branch about a metre long.

Sydney - Qantas Airways Ltd failed to meet its own maintenance performance targets, Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) said Monday.

CASA decided to investigate the carrier after a run of technical hitches that saw an emergency landing, bits falling off planes and ground crew forgetting to empty toilet tanks.

Sydney - Things must be bad: revenues at Sydney's Star City casino are down by a quarter as the comfort blanket of a red-hot resources sector slips away and more people feel the chill of the global financial freeze.

Times must be good: the Queensland state government is spending 400,000 Australian dollars (about 350,000 US dollars) a month carting water to Cloncurry, a copper and gold mining town that is running low on supplies because its population has doubled in the past five years.

And there it is: a two-speed economy - tough times in Sydney, where a fifth of Australians live, but dollars aplenty in boom towns like Cloncurry.

Sydney - Australian hikers on the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea have stumbled across the skeletal remains of what they believe is a World War II pilot, still in a parachute harness and suspended from a tree.

"It's swinging like somebody caught in a tree and that's when you can really see the cabling and it's the exact shape of a body, same size, everything, but it's just covered in moss," tour guide David Collins told Australia's ABC Radio on Thursday.

"It's exactly what it looks like - just somebody caught in a harness, in a seat harness."