Jamie* nearly burst with pink pride when he produced a nude photo of himself, taken by his "ex-mother-in-law".

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.