| I
barely blinked. He was trying to persuade me to write a
story on his flying machine invention, which was to run
entirely on magnetic fields. He had done some drawings.
They looked like he had placed a compass on a whole lot
of settings and created a pretty pattern of circles on the
page.
"I'm afraid I don't know much about engineering," I apologised.
He looked sympathetic.
"Does it have a pilot?"
"Yes, he sits in the middle. Actually, there's two pilots,
one in case the first one has a heart attack," Jamie said.
"Look, I'm not sure whether I can do a story."
And out came the photo. He promised to drop by again some
time.
Just
another day working on a suburban newspaper, an experience
often more interesting for the stories that don't make it
to print than for those that do. Some don't make it for
ethical or legal reasons and they are often sad. The seven'year'old
who hung himself from the hills hoist with his football
bootlaces. We don't do suicide. The way a teenage rape and
murder victim had been mutilated. The family itself was
unaware. The high school teacher sending lewd text messages
to his students. Defamatory. Others don't make it for, well,
other reasons.
Liam
came into the office with steely resolve in his eye and
an introduction no journalist could refuse.
"I have a story for you that has everything ... fraud, corruption,
conspiracy... you are not going to believe this. It goes
right to the top level of government."
So began the terrible tale of how the Commonwealth had cheated
him of $1 million.
"I have the documentation, everything," he declared.
Liam said he had signed a contract with the federal government,
that he would do the compulsory training required for unemployment
benefits, on the condition that for every day he was not
employed afterwards they would pay him $10,000. This had
quickly racked up, but the Commonwealth was denying the
document's existence. Problem was, Liam had also lost it.
"I have contacted everybody: ASIO, ASIC, ICAC, the federal
police, the federal member. All of them say they can't do
anything unless I find the contract. It's fraud."
"Leave the paperwork with me," I said. "I can't promise
to do a story but I'll look at it."
"Thank you so much for listening. You are the first person
who has listened to me," he replied and left, not to return
for a few weeks.
 In
the meantime, we met Stefan. The wily Filipino made a picturesque
sight playing chess with his friends in the sun, but having
his photo taken gave him a taste for publicity and he had
a lot of theories that he needed to share with the world.
Stefan, you see, had been given an electric shock as a young
man from poking a stick into a hole in the ground. This
had brought him to several conclusions which he pitched
to us as story ideas on a weekly basis:
One, that earthquakes were not in fact caused by shifting
tectonic plates but by underground electrical currents.
Two, that these currents could be harnessed and turned into
rain clouds.
Three, that it could zap around hospital waiting rooms and
kill the SARS virus.
Liam
came back several weeks later and announced that the federal
member was avoiding him. The secretary had told Liam he
was out of the office, but Liam could swear he was hiding
out the back. Given Liam's frequent visits to the man, this
seemed to me entirely likely.
"I am getting desperate. If someone doesn't listen to me
soon, I'm going to take someone hostage," Liam said.
"Please don't do that," I said. "I'll have another look
at it. Can't promise a story though."
"Thanks for listening. You should stand for parliament,"
he added.
One
of our best sources for stories, of varying quality, was
a short, 60'ish woman, Helen, who bustled about town with
her trusty sidekick, Janine. They used to go out to public
housing estates, investigate the tenants' troubles and then
get in the ear of the police and the local media. They were
usually gripes about the Department of Housing and crime.
Helen would ring up and say, "Hey listen," and fly into
a torrent of sordid and compelling stories. We heard about
rape, murder, domestic violence, corruption, drink spiking,
underage nightclub drug dealers, security guard drug dealers,
hairdressers as fronts for drug dealers and wheelchair'ridden
drug dealers. She took down the numberplates of the cars
that went in and out of drug dens and wrote them down in
her notebook. She introduced us to ex'cons and current crims.
She took us to burnt'out housing estates and armed herself
with a stick.
Once
she rang about "poor Marie". There were a whole lot of "turban'heads"
living next to Marie and they had meetings in the middle
of the night where they shouted at each other and once they
disappeared for three weeks and one of them was a chemical
engineer. So? Well, they're obviously making a bomb! Of
course.
Perhaps
predictably, Marie's main issue appeared to be that people
living in Australia shouldn't speak in their own language
and wear traditional dress. (Marie herself spoke with
a heavy East European accent.) Once she had been forced
to confront a man wearing Arab dress in a shopping centre.
"I just couldn't stop myself, I just had to say to him,
'I find it offensive that you are walking around here
in your pajamas'."
When I asked her for proof that the people next door were
making a bomb, she replied: "Proof? I'll give you proof.
You come out here for a while and listen to them. They're
always shouting at each other in Arabic. And one woman
who used to live there has moved out."
In the end I conceded that perhaps they were making a
bomb, but perhaps they were having late night prayer meetings
or family feuds. There was to be no terrorist plot scoop
that day.
Liam
came back a few weeks later, showed me the scar on his
head where someone had broken in and hit him with a pool
cue as he slept. He felt his life was in danger.
"Lock your door," I said.
"Can't. My caravan doesn't have a door. I don't have a
gate."
He told me the latest on the fraud. "Seriously, if someone
does not listen to me soon, I am going to commit suicide."
"Please don't commit suicide," I said. "Leave it with
me. I can't promise anything, but I'll have a look."
"Thanks for listening. You're the only person who listens
to me."
By
now, the only reason I listened was for that reason alone.
But to my shame, I stopped after that. The next time he
came in he had lost interest in the fraud, but was hysterically
concerned about children drinking from a fountain that
pigeons shat in. I told the receptionist to say I wasn't
there. When I was transferred to another paper, he said
to my unfortunate replacement, "No wonder. She never wrote
any stories."
But
sometimes listening was enough. An old man came to see
me a week after I wrote a story about a local digger who
had received a military honour.
He said: "You'll never guess. That bloke in the paper
last week, I never met him but I grew up one suburb away
from him, I signed up the same time as him and I fought
in many of the same places."
"Right," I said. "What a coincidence. Um... it's just
that we had a story about war veterans in the paper last
week and I'm not sure whether it might be too soon to
do another one."
"Oh no," he said. "I'm not interested in a story. I just
wanted you to know."
*Names
have been changed.
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