[1] Also in 1930, for example, she won prizes in the needlework and painting sections of the Mount Barker Show, at SASA she won second prize in the Gill Medal competition for excellence in design and workmanship among technical art students for a silk-shawl (brush-batik) work and at the All Australian Exhibition where she received an honourable mention in a competition to apply a design based on a plant study in any medium.
[13] Dora lived with her parents in Verdun Street in North Kensington while studying and she maintained an active social life including being on the committee of the Trianon (dance) Club.
Dora, unlike many young women of the time, could drive a car and in December 1932 she accompanied her parents on a three-week trip to Sydney where they “will travel by motor and Miss Chapman will relieve her father at the wheel”.
In December 1933 Dora and some other SASAC students including Douglas Welsh held an exhibition of their artworks in Edments Building where almost all of the works sold and some commissions were placed.
Then in 1935 she held her first solo exhibition of 37 works at the Myer “Apollo” Dining Hall in Adelaide with her still life images deemed most successful.
She was a founder with James Cant, Hal Missingham, Bernard Smith, Roderick Shaw and Roy Dalgarno of the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) in Sydney in 1946.
[21] After returning to Australia in 1955 they spent time in Adelaide and in 1956, under the name Dora C. Cant, she exhibited four works (two Abstract Enamels, a Life Study and an oil painting of Port Willunga lent by Mrs F. Nora?
One of a small, but growing number of Australian women art critics for news periodicals she wrote for the Adelaide Advertiser during these years and in 1961 she was awarded the Melrose Prize for portraiture for the second time.
It has been suggested that they may have regularly stayed in Willunga and perhaps from as early as 1962 they may have rented 13 St Peters Terrace from the owner Penbertha Alice Pointon, who died in 1964.
On 9 January 1965 they purchased Heysed’s Cottage (Somerset) at 13 St Peters Terrace, Wilunga from Ms. Pointon’s executors as their second home in the country (pied-a-terre or holiday house).
They approached the National Trust of South Australia and the District Council of Willunga but neither organisation would bear the expenditure for restoration and the ongoing operational costs.
From about 1969 Dora became interested in representing aspects of human character, rather than individuals, and produced a series of silkscreens in the form of stylised, female portrait heads, some named after Australian native plants.