He says: Two hundred and fifty pounds a month in your twenties looks just about do- able if

He says: "Two hundred and fifty pounds a month in your twenties looks just about do- able if you started in a good job. That's a liquid million, ignoring the value of your house, pension and so on Mr Martin put together some sample figures (see table). But can you make a million without subjecting yourself to the terrors of the television studio? We asked investment expert Simon Martin, a research actuary with AON Consulting, to work out how you could be a millionaire by 60, with saving and investing. Chris Tarrant has caught the national imagination with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on ITV. He paid pounds 7 per night at the McLeod Street Youth Hostel in Cairns.Cairns contacts: Flecker Botanic Gardens: Collins Avenue; Royal Flying Doctor Service, 1 Junction Street; Whitfield Range Environmental Park, entrance on Collins Avenue; Red Ochre Grill, 43 Shields Street, Cairns.For more information on Australia contact the Australian Tourism Commission, Gemini House, 10-18 Putney Hill, London, SW15 or call 09068 633235 (50p/ min)for a brochure. The meat served in this modern Australian bistro was exquisitely tender and tasty, washed down with a venerable Shiraz that complemented the young flesh.No wonder that wallaby - let's call him Swampy - looked so scared.Simon Calder paid pounds 931 for a curious itinerary to Cairns and back, via Madras, Mumbai, Singapore, Darwin, Jakarta and Feltham, booked through Quest Worldwide (0181-547 3322). I wandered into town past the backpackers' hostel and sheltered from the rain under the awning of the Red Ochre Restaurant.

This imported species flourishes so well in Queensland that it can afford to have members flattened by the million on the highway. The creature even takes revenge from beyond the Tarmac grave: animals and birds tempted to treat the two-dimensional toad as carrion find out to their cost that the amphibian has a poisonous gland.None of which could temper a hunger induced by a day in the Outback. This whole surreal scene is made all the stranger by the occasional roar of a stray Boeing, and a series of sickening squelches.These turn out to be the fatal interaction between cars speeding along the airport road and cane toads. The mud is punctuated by "pencil roots", sticks that allow the plants to breathe something other than saline solution, and "knee roots" that lope in double-joints along the surface while crabs scuttle sideways. But this is real mangrove swamp, as the slender trunks reveal. They are clad in fleshy bark that dries to a porcelain white because of the salt sucked in from the seawater that washes over them.Among the two dozen species of mangrove are some which sweat salt through their leaves and others which rise from a squabble of roots to form the arboreal equivalent of flying buttresses.

Cairns airport has gone one better, by creating a Swamp Trail.This does not involve tunnelling beneath the runway, but a raised boardwalk that sends you hovering three feet above the sort of gunk you find when runways are being gouged out of fields. The bouncing, bulbous creature responsible was a swamp wallaby, enjoying The Wet more than the rest of us. But he looked more frightened of me than me of him.At the Abta convention, the Manchester Airport people were joking about asking the environmental protester Swampy to open the new runway. The silly portion comprises Northern Exhausts and O'Brien Windscreens, two of the more prominent members of a motor trade that is sprinkled along Captain Cook Highway.Beyond them, man and nature tussle over the mangrove swamp that thinks it's an airport.