‘I never felt right’: DNA test reveals Melbourne woman introduced to wrong ‘biological mother’

Penny Mackieson bonded for two decades with a woman she was told put her up for adoption

Penny Mackieson finally has the name that feels right to her, nearly 60 years after she was inadvertently swapped with another baby when the infants were placed for adoption.

After mustering the courage to contact the person that records indicated was her biological mother, the Melbourne woman spent two decades getting to know and love the woman and her family.

But gnawing doubts, spurred by the fact she resembled no one in the family, led her and her believed-to-be mother to take DNA tests, which revealed they were not related.

Adoption Information Services then connected with an elderly Greek woman – Mackieson’s real biological mother.

After a 15-minute court hearing before the Victorian county court on Tuesday, Mackieson’s 33-year search for the truth was finalised.

She was allowed to correct her birth records and integrate her Greek mother’s name with the one given to her by her adoptive parents.

“It’s just a huge relief,” Mackieson said.

“It feels like this is the first day of the rest of my life. I feel much more optimistic and I feel freer – this is who I am.

“It’s not just vindication … I never felt right and like I belonged. But I feel anchored now.”

Born at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Hospital in 1963, Mackieson always knew she was adopted.

She was raised in a nurturing and loving family, but never knew who her biological parents were.

Mackieson applied for her adoption records in 1989 and obtained what was thought to have been her birth name and mother’s identity in 1990.

She sat on this information until 1997 when, after the premature death of her twins, she felt motivated to approach the Victorian Adoption Network for Information and Self Help (Vanish), a Melbourne-based adoption support network, in order to contact her biological mother.

The woman agreed to have contact with Mackieson, who then spent nearly 20 years forming a rapport with the family.

But something never seemed right and out of sheer desperation Mackieson took an Ancestry DNA test in 2016, revealing she had a 70% Greek ethnicity and zero Irish-English-Welsh ancestry, putting her at odds with the Anglo-Celtic family she was supposedly related to.

Another DNA test confirmed in 2019 Mackieson and the woman she thought was her mother were not genetically related.

Mackieson notified the state government’s Adoption Information Services and they soon identified a Greek mother who delivered a girl at Queen Victoria hospital the same day she was born.

The two babies, it became clear, must have been swapped and incorrectly identified.

The Greek woman told AIS, through interpreters, she was glad to hear Mackieson had lived a happy and healthy life.

But she did not want further contact.

Mackieson will in July visit Greece for the first time, travelling with a passport bearing her integrated name, something she describes as “magical”.

She will visit the Peloponnese region, where her mother is from, with her husband and son.

But there will be no Greek family reunion.

“I won’t get to meet my mother because she said she doesn’t want contact,” Mackieson said.

“And that will be very, very sad. But who wants to be the person who stresses out an 80-something-year-old woman so much she has a heart attack.

“I couldn’t live with that either.”

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