Dorcas Tinamayi Bennett was born in 1956 at Wurturu rockhole near Kaltukatjarra (Docker River), deep within her parents’ traditional lands. “I was born in the bush,” she recalls, “and my mother and father walked with me to Warburton Mission, where the missionary Mr Will Wade gave me my English name.” Her early childhood unfolded entirely on Country, shaped by long-distance travel, cultural obligation, and the upheavals brought by colonial intrusion in the Western Desert.

After leaving Warburton Mission, her family walked back toward the Warakurna–Tjukurla region. Not long after, they were forced to leave again as radioactive fallout from the Maralinga atomic tests drifted across the desert. “The funny smell made a lot of people sick,” Dorcas remembers—an understated but powerful reference to one of the most devastating episodes in the region’s modern history. The family was later picked up by Native Patrol Officer Bob McAuley, travelling with him in his well-known yellow government truck to the settlement of Amata, before continuing by camel to Areyonga, where Dorcas first attended school.

She and her family returned to Warakurna in the mid-1970s with the establishment of the outstation movement, which allowed Ngaanyatjarra families to return to their homelands after decades of displacement. For Dorcas, this return marked the re-establishment of strong cultural ties and community cohesion.

Painting entered her life formally in 2005, when Warakurna Artists converted the old community shop into a functioning art centre. “We started painting on paper, then on canvas. The old shop turned into an art centre—that’s where we all started doing painting,” she says. Since then, Dorcas has become one of the art centre’s most respected senior artists and now serves as Chairperson of Warakurna Artists, contributing to governance, cultural leadership, and intergenerational knowledge transfer within the community.

Dorcas is the daughter of Nyurupayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett), a major figure in Western Desert art and ceremony, known for her deep ritual authority, her extensive cultural knowledge, and her influential body of work held in major national collections. Dorcas’s artistic practice is intimately connected to her mother’s vast cultural legacy. Her paintings follow and renew the Tjukurrpa that map the country between Tjukurla and Warakurna, particularly the rockholes, sandhills (tali), water sources (kapi warnanpa), and women’s travelling narratives associated with the site of Yumarra.

As the final custodian of these ancestral stories, Dorcas paints with both responsibility and vitality. Her works carry the textures of Country, dotted ridgelines, circular waterholes, and the intricate pathways of ancestral women, expressed with an immediacy that connects her mother’s ceremonial knowledge to her own contemporary expression. Her paintings are widely exhibited and increasingly recognised for their cultural depth, compositional confidence, and continuity of lineage.