Burke attended Catholic Ladies College, East Melbourne (1965-1967), then Malvern Girls High School (1967-1970).
The following year, she co-curated A Room of One's Own: Three Women Artists, perhaps Australia's first feminist group exhibition with Lynne Cook and Kiffy Rubbo, director of the George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne.
She had a residency at Paretaio, the house belonging to Australian artist Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne situated halfway between Pisa and Florence.
Judith Blackall had established the Boyd home as a studio and residency for artists, administered by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Artists resident around the same time as Burke included Janet Laurence, Elizabeth Gower, John R. Neeson and Domenico de Clario.
In 1984, she sojourned in Paris, where she befriended artists Stephen Benwell, Anton Hart, Bronwyn Oliver and Don Walters (all resident at the Cite Internationale des Arts) and translator Julie Rose.
In the mid-80s, Burke settled in Robe Street, St Kilda, where Joy Hester and Albert Tucker had lived in the 1940s.
She continued to write fiction, both novels and short stories, as well as contributing art reviews and essays to journals and newspapers.
When Burke was a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, Sweeney, an artist and a former gallery director, was a mature age student in the printmaking department.
She was a member of the committee which oversaw the restoration of Heide I, the Reed's original home on the property, which opened to the public in 2001.
In Australian Gothic, Burke wrote it was unlikely that Sweeney was the son of Albert Tucker, but rather of well-known Melbourne drummer Billy Hyde (1918–1976).
Nest: The Art of Birds (Allen & Unwin 2012) was also an exhibition of the same title which Burke curated for McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery in 2013.
Edited by Helen Hughes and Nicholas Croggan, the papers were published as Impresario: Paul Taylor The Melbourne Years 1981-1984 (2013).
In 2014, Burke organised the conference "Kiffy Rubbo and the George Paton Gallery: Curating the 1970s" at the University of Melbourne.