An Australian woman who fell into a rock crevice while trying to retrieve her mobile phone spent seven hours hanging upside down before she was finally rescued.

Matilda Campbell was hiking with friends in bushland in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, when she accidentally dropped her device.

But while trying to recover it she slipped and fell 10ft, and ended up wedged upside down between two large boulders.

Photographs of her ordeal showed the crack in the rocks with only the soles of her bare feet visible.

After her friends made a desperate, failed attempt to rescue her, one of them hiked to a position where there was phone reception and called emergency services for help.

Dozens of police, paramedics, firefighters and rescue experts from the nearby town of Cessnock, north of Sydney, then rushed to the scene.