Walker was born in Walhalla in 1879.[2] She attended the Bendigo School of Mines where she studied under Arthur T. Woodward. She then moved to Melbourne where she studied with Max Meldrum.[3]
Bendigo Art Gallery displayed her narrative painting, a watercolour, News from the Front, in its Victorian Gold Jubilee exhibition of 1901-1902, and its subsequent purchase from admission fees and art union was debated in a drawn-out selection process of elimination over April–June 1902,[4] in which it remained the only work by a woman and in competition against eight notables including Gustave Doré, Rupert Bunney, Julian Ashton and J. Ford Patterson.[5] Ultimately the Gallery purchased the large Doré Joseph's Flight Into Egypt.[6][7] News from the Front was shown as a non-competitive entry in the Australian Exhibition of Women's Work and gifted by the artist to Castlemaine Art Museum in 1940.[8]
Walker exhibited her work around Melbourne at the Victorian Artists Society, and the Athenaeum Gallery. She showed her work under the name "Mrs George Hartrick" after she wed.[3]
She was a member of the Victorian Artists Society, the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.[3]
She died in 1942.[2]
In 2013 Walker was included in the exhibition Towards Perth: Western Australian Women Artists Before 1950 at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Crawley, Australia.[9]
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