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.
We drive to Port Kembla, which, in 1962, was stoked with the dispossessed of the Old World, pouring steel back into the reconstruction of their war-ravaged homelands. Now it's virtually a ghost town. They're putting together an industrial museum, and that has an ominous ring to it.
No trucks, no people, just dead grass blowing against concrete constructions bearing hopeful brand names like BlueScope and Otis. The great, greasy conveyor belts, the wheels, the cogs and the buckets are frozen, like a backdrop for a Japanese manga comic, against a sea empty of ships.
The traditional green and ochre-tiled pubs welcome you into the main street, which then runs up past papered over, boarded up and caged shops, to the stunned, lifeless little houses being sold off at the top. In the coming week, ABC's Four Corners is to pan the same route, interviewing an under-employed wharfie who is fossicking for change and struggling to save his home, his family and his dignity.
However, all is not lost. The restaurants are holding out, and after a meal worthy of Sydney and a bill to match, we are sleeping the sleep of the righteous.
But towards midnight, the addicts, the drunks, the hoons and the hookers exact their revenge. Only a latter-day William Hogarth could record his Gin Lane meeting Smack Alley as the police shovel the jobless youth into the paddy wagons, and from there, on Monday morning, into the police station and law courts, beside the cathedral whose notice board still reassures them that Christ is Risen.
By this stage, we're beating a retreat, stopping off at Mount Keira for an obligatory 50-years-down-the-track photo. Then it's into the gentle, seaside resort of Thirroul, where we climb the headland, to catch a glimpse of 'Wyewurk', the bungalow that Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, rented in 1922. Here, D H sat on the grass round the back, leaning against the warm red bricks, and writing Kangaroo up in five nondescript exercise books.
At the end of the week, he swung down to the station and caught the little train to Sydney. The coal trucks trundling by would have been familiar to the collier's son who had managed to escape the mines in the English midlands. Like us, he was passing through. There weren't many years left to him. Just enough to write Lady Chatterley and to experience The Great Crash.
Eleanor Massey is a long time English teacher who now works casually in NSW schools. She is a freelance writer, with a number of published articles in such magazines as The Big Issue, Good Reading and Wet Ink.