Symphony musician's move to the Hawkesbury River sparks new career

Australia Broadcast Center

09-07-2025

Central Coast resident Marnie Sebire, who captains an oyster boat during the day and performs with an orchestra at night, says she has "the best of both worlds".
Ms Sebire is a French hornist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and drives her boat, The High Cs, to work each day from her home on the Hawkesbury River.
In 2021 the 51-year-old relocated from the hustle and bustle of Sydney's North Shore to her Bar Point home, which is only accessible by water.
The only catch was that she'd never driven a boat.
"It was serendipity — a friend was selling the house and I had actually just sold my house in Sydney," Ms Sebire said.
"COVID had shut everything down. I was thinking about what it meant to be an artist during that time and it provoked a reassessment of my priorities.
"I bought the house and I haven't looked back."
Beginning a life on the water was a steep learning curve that required rethinking the most basic aspects of life.
"[You have] to be organised, you can't just pop down the street for a bottle of milk," Ms Sebire said.
A simple task like grocery shopping can be "labour intensive".
"You've got to get [the shopping] from the shop to the car, then into the boat, in an esky and eventually upstairs into the house," Ms Sebire said.
"The biggest thing is how to handle a boat … without it, you couldn't live on a boat-access property."
Ms Sebire wanted to feel totally independent on the water, so she enrolled in a maritime course at TAFE.
"Out here you're really reliant upon yourself, " she said.
"I knew that I needed to know a lot more about boating if I was going to be living here for a long time.
"The focus of the course was getting familiar with what a boat is and how it operates … it was essential knowledge."
Ms Sebire followed up with an additional course and qualified as a coxswain, which means she can command and operate a vessel up to 12 metres in length.
It's a skill that has opened up opportunities she would never have previously imagined, but she needed access to a bigger boat in order to undertake the training.
"I had to find someone who was willing to let me work on their vessel and I bumped into a fifth generation oyster farmer … and it went from there," Ms Sebire said.
Ms Sebire started playing the French horn in her early teens.
Over the years she has toured with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Australian World Orchestra and Silverchair during the 2008 Big Day Out festival.
Nowadays Ms Sebire's office is the Sydney Opera House.
"Generally we do four performances a week — there's a lot of travel backwards and forwards," she said.
But she is still touring as the captain of an oyster boat.
"It's a bit of a balancing act, [but] to have this within an hour of Sydney blows my mind," Ms Sebire said.
"Sharing this place with others is something I can see myself doing long into the future.
"I've done a lot of travelling and I just didn't think there was anything like this, that I could balance my music and life on the water.