The box Brownie immortalises the school girls on Mount Keira lookout, and catches a glimpse of Wollongong, and the Port Kembla steel works far below. It's 1962, and we are over from Auckland to see Australia, whipping up and down the coast in aeroplanes and steam trains, to admire all that wealth for toil.
We are the baby boomers, and the world is our oyster.
Nearly 50 years on, from a second floor window of Wollongong's Ibis hotel, the world looks less for the taking. The hotel is a serviceable box of a place, its concrete legs straddling the top of Market Street, above the ramshackle town, which still looks, as D. H. Lawrence described it in 1922 'as if it had tumbled haphazard off the pantechnicon of civilisation as it dragged round the edges of this wild land, and there lay busy but not rooted in'.
And up behind this tumbled-off town looms the black, anvil-shaped Illawarra escarpment, with the lookout on top. To the 1962 buttoned-up school girls, Lawrence meant the Lady Chatterley trial. We didn't know or care that he had visited the Illawarra, or written a book called Kangaroo.
The reception area carries brochures about the Anglican Cathedral which occupies the land round the back. The brochures fold out like a triptych, and encourage a visit to the cathedral, via steps built up from under the hotel's legs. But, as is often the case these days, no matter how much I rattle the doors, they refuse to budge, and the woman in charge, witnessing this attempted break-in, pats her pockets and says she doesn't know what she's done with the key, but that I'm welcome to last week's Easter pew notes if I like.
So we hit the town. Market Street tips into Keira Street. Most of the buildings are dilapidated and jerry-built. Legal firms elbow one another upstairs, while too many shops at street level are To Let, For Sale or plastered in newspapers and promising no cash on the premises.
It's early Saturday morning, and the Mall is forlorn. A girl on a poster says she doesn't want to be a slave to heroin any more while a mum tells her nagging kid to quit bugging her, because she doesn't get paid till Tuesday.
The rest of the dispossessed just pile up listlessly in a place that is warm and dry.