Wendy Monk was sorting through a pile of her late mother's belongings last year when an old newspaper clipping caught her eye. 

The article dated back more than half a century and showed newborn twins in the premature ward of Victoria's Bendigo Hospital in 1969.

It was the same year and same hospital where Monk herself was born a month later.

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"My parents moved around the state, from Bendigo to Warrnambool and to Maryborough, and they chucked almost everything out every time they moved," Monk said. 

"But, for some reason, my mum always kept this newspaper article.

"In the article, the twins aren't named but one is described as being 'in care'."

The article tugged at Monk in a powerful way, because of something she had long suspected about herself – that she had a missing twin.

"It struck me, 'Oh my god, maybe one of those twins is me'," she said.

Her suspicion that she had a twin was one that Monk put to her mother before her death in 2011 – long before she even saw the newspaper article.

Two weeks before her mother died, Wendy said she asked her for the truth, only to receive a cryptic reply.

"We were on the phone and I asked her if I had a twin – she said she had promised somebody she wouldn't talk about it," Monk said. 

"They had told her it was better for me if I didn't know. 

"All she would say was that she wasn't going to break her promise."

'I always felt something was missing'

Growing up, Monk said she always felt a little bit wrong.

"I always felt something was missing. I always felt alone," Monk said. 

But it was only through a series of bizarre events, in which people consistently mistook Monk for another woman or vice versa, that the idea she might have an identical twin began to take shape. 

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