'I WAS SWAPPED AT BIRTH'

David's life would have been very different without a hospital error made 85 years ago

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For more than eight decades, David Maloney believed he was one of 11 children - but a DNA test revealed an astonishing truth.

“Sit down, I've got something to tell you,” recalls David, 85, of the day his son Bradley flew from Melbourne to Perth, to break the news. “He showed me the Maloney family tree and said, ‘You're not in it, you're a Madden, not a Maloney. You were switched at birth’.

“I was overwhelmed, at first,” says the avid golfer, tears welling in his eyes. “After so many years on this planet, how could something like this happen to me? Then when I learnt I had a brother and sister alive, I was so excited. This whole affair has given me a new lease on life.”

It must have been a busy day on the maternity ward at Sydney's Paddington Hospital, on June 14, 1939. Why else would baby Ernest Maloney have gone home with Margaret Madden while newborn David Madden left in the arms of Sarah Maloney? Neither ever knew of the tragic mix-up.

Ernie and David would grow up not only looking different to their siblings, but also feeling like the black sheep in their inherited families.

David endured a difficult childhood. Sent to a boys’ home at just five years old, because his parents couldn’t cope with so many children, he left to work on a farm by his mid-teens. Of the 26 institutionalised boys, he was the only one never to receive a visitor, or present from his parents.