Rose Overberg used to stare in the mirror at her “funny” eyebrows and wonder where they came from. She says they are short – like they are missing a finishing flourish. But she didn’t inherit them from the mother or the father who lovingly raised her.
Instead, the archaeologist is the product of one of Australia’s earliest insemination clinics, recognised for their culture of secrecy and strict promise of donor anonymity.
While she had always known she was a sperm-donor child, by the time she began searching for her biological father, almost four decades after her 1975 conception in Melbourne, records of her early beginnings had been ‘“lost or misplaced”, as she was told in a letter from the doctor who performed the procedure.