HELEN MUSA talks to renowned flautist Sally Walker, who recently made the tough decision to step away from her full-time role at the ANU School of Music after eight years.

As the ANU School of Music enters a new chapter, many of the musicians who have long called Canberra home are reassessing their lives and careers in its wake.

Among them is flautist Sally Walker, who recently made the tough decision to step away from her full-time role after eight years.

She continues to teach a small cohort of flute students on a casual basis, but the shift marks a significant turning point.

Walker’s departure comes despite a career of remarkable recognition, including, earlier this year, People’s Choice runner-up for Limelight Artist of the Year, for which she was described as “a powerful advocate of Australian music” and credited with “thrilling audiences on stage and on disc.”

Now, her life looks quite different.

She and her husband, engineer-musician Jose, have settled in a 1.2-hectare property in Murrumbateman, where for Jose, who grew up in Patagonia, Argentina, the wide-open spaces feel like home. For Walker, it has been an adventurous adjustment, but one she has embraced.

Rural life comes with unexpected companions. Neighbours include Max the stallion and Dorothy the sheep, but it has also offered something increasingly rare: space to think, reflect, and create.

“It’s a quieter life,” she suggests, “but not a slower one.”

Far from retreating, Walker’s schedule remains both local and international. 

Locally, for instance, she performed last year for the Yass Music Club with pianist Simon Tedeschi, a long-time friend dating back to their SBS Radio and Television Youth Orchestra days. And in late March there was the world premiere of a flutes-only version of Miguel Del Aguíla’s Submerged at Smith’s Alternative.

She continues to teach as a guest artist at the Australian National Academy of Music, also maintaining strong ties to Europe after a distinguished academic career in Germany, where she lived for many years, touring with the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and serving as principal flute with the Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss.

But her connection to Canberra remains personal. Born and educated in the city, she returned after years away to be closer to her late parents and to help with medical appointments.

“There is a permanent place in my heart for Canberra,” she says.

That connection makes the events surrounding the School of Music particularly poignant.

“There’s a deep grief,” she reflects, “but also a lasting fondness. It’s where I began.”

Recent years have also brought personal loss, prompting Walker to reassess priorities. 

A major highlight on the horizon is the public release of her recording with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra made last year while she was Artist in Focus for CSO’s 75th anniversary season and featuring a program of Australian flute concertos, three of which were written specifically for her. 

Among them is a new work by acting head of the School of Music, Chris Sainsbury, which is widely regarded as the first indigenous Australian flute concerto.

The piece draws on Sainsbury’s cultural heritage, including a word from his mother tongue, Dharug, relating to dolphins, an animal Walker admits she is “mad” about. The concerto evokes dolphin song and movement across three sections, blending acoustic instruments into a vivid, immersive sound world and involving some delicious glissandos.

This connection to the natural world extends beyond the stage. 

In July, flightpaths permitting, Walker hopes to travel to Sataya in the Red Sea, where she will swim with and play music to a pod of around 300 dolphins, part of her evolving project Living Poems of the Sea, which has seen her swimming and playing with dolphins in Australian settings. 

The coming months are filled with similarly ambitious projects: curating performances for the inaugural Wagga Weekender Music Festival; intimate concerts for palliative care patients; touring Europe; collaborating in London with Royal College of Music researchers; and performing in Japan with long-time colleague, flautist Kazuko Ihara.

Meanwhile, projects continue apace, including that album release with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra and a new commission for Richard Tognetti.

If the past year has been marked by upheaval, it has also opened unexpected doors and while the institutional landscape around her may be changing, her direction feels clear.

She recalls the words of Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt: “Let music be your compass and your home.” 

Music, as ever, remains both her compass, and her home.

Sally Walker will appear at the Wagga Weekender Music Festival, April 17–19, followed by Invitation to the Dance presented by Salut! Baroque at Wesley Church, April 24.