The true confessions of a classified ads voyeur.

Journalist Fiona Harari is a self-described classifieds voyeur. She’s been scouring the back pages of newspapers and weird corners of the internet for more than 15 years. In her ‘Addendum’ series for Radiotonic, she found that the stories behind the ads are tragic, funny and overwhelmingly human.

There are so many stories out there: the minister trying to reunite some luggage, abandoned on a country highway, with its owner; the woman searching for her birth mother; the elderly man looking for his first love, not because he wants to rekindle an old romance, but because he would just like to know whatever happened to her.

These are everyday stories of ordinary people. They feature themes most of us can relate to - love and longing, family and mystery - with a simple charm not always found in mainstream news reporting.

These stories all have something in common. Each one of them was found in the classifieds.

Every day, thousands of classified advertisements are published around Australia. The ads were once rivers of gold for newspapers, providing valuable streams of income as people all over the country sought to sell their message in as few words as possible. Even though those rivers have all but dried up, the classifieds continue - now more than ever online, wordier than before but no less interesting.

I have a particular interest in the classifieds - not, though, as a buyer or seller. I am, I suppose, more a classified voyeur. I scan ads for stories. It’s a habit that started 15 years ago, when, as a senior newspaper journalist I was asked to write a new weekly column. The editor had heard about an American writer who sifted through phone books from all over the country, called people at random, and then wrote their stories. Why not do the same with classified ads?

My initial reaction was scepticism. Who would willingly share their personal details with a stranger over the phone? And what were the odds their stories, or their ads, would be interesting anyway?

Almost everyone was willing to talk, I soon learned. And the odds of a good story, it turned out, were also fairly favourable. I was amazed and gratified, from the very first call - about an ad selling a Shania Twain costume - by the willingness of people to impart so much about themselves.

Feel like reminiscing about where a Shania Twain costume might have come from? Here you go. (Post continues after video.)

Time and again, during the column’s four-year run, people from all over told me about themselves and their ads in enormous detail. So many of those stories have stuck with me: the son-in-law who accidentally sold some statues belonging to his mother-in-law, the network marketer from Perth who became a serious James Bond fan, the heartfelt words of an old man when his lifelong friend died.

Sometimes I was the only person to even respond to the ad. Often I had no idea where the conversation would go. An ad for goats might lead to a detailed discussion about the breakdown of a marriage. A classified for David Cassidy/Partridge Family memorabilia became a deeply sad account of a couple whose lives had become paralysed as a husband struggled to best support a wife suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder.

There was the elderly woman trying to raise enough money to buy a headstone for her daughter’s grave - this story emerged from an ad listing a voice synthesiser, which the grieving mother was selling, along with a Venetian lamp, as she tried to scrape together the stonemason’s fee. After that story was published, countless readers responded by spontaneously sending the woman money, until she had more than she needed. And I’ll never forget the woman from the UK who was seeking her close relatives after many decades. She placed one ad. I was the only person to ever respond to it. Within days of her story appearing in print, her family was reunited.

Now the stories behind the classifieds are coming to radio, and instead of looking in the newspaper, I’ve turned to the internet. It’s been a decade since I last cold called anyone about their ad, and again there was that old sense of trepidation. Who would tell their story to a stranger on the phone?  And what were the odds of finding interesting stories? But again, those concerns were unfounded.

People are as willing as ever to tell their stories, from the 90-year-old psychic who has spent most of her life fighting for the right to believe in the unknown, to the animal lovers contributing to the burgeoning rodent trade.

The process of finding these stories is as straightforward as ever. I look for an ad that piques my interest, phone the number that’s included, and off we go. So far everyone has been happy to talk. Hopefully it will stay that way. Technology might have changed, allowing ads to ramble more than ever, and they’ve become rife with spelling errors. But what’s very clear, having produced a radio series inspired by the classifieds, is that there are still plenty more tales to be told.

Have you ever responded to a classified ad - or posted one?

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This post originally appeared on the ABC and was republished here with full permission. 

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