Since 1993, it has awarded a Red Ochre Award. The Australia Council for the Arts arts funding and advisory body for the Government of Australia. Pilkington Garimara was posthumously inducted into the Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame in 2022. Pilkington Garimara died of ovarian cancer at age 76 on 10 April 2014 in Perth, Western Australia. In May 2008, she was awarded the $50,000 Red Ochre Award which is made to an indigenous artist for their outstanding, lifelong contribution to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts at home and abroad. She was appointed co-patron of Australia's State and Federal Sorry Day committee's Journey of Healing in 2002. In 1990, Pilkington's book Caprice: A Stockman's Daughter, the first of the trilogy, won the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards' Unpublished Indigenous Writer – The David Unaipon Award. In the four books, Caprice, a Stockman's Daughter, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, Home to Mother, and Under the Wintamarra Tree, Pilkington documented three generations of women in her family. Home to Mother is her children's edition of Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence.

Her follow-up book, Under the Wintamarra Tree, details her own life at Moore River and at the Roelands Native Mission and how she managed to escape by enrolling in a nursing school. The book was made into an internationally successful film in 2002, directed by Phillip Noyce. Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is considered a powerful description of the abuses endured by the Stolen Generations. Doris was reunited with her mother 21 years later. Her younger sister, Annabelle, was also taken and was told she was an orphan, and over the years distanced herself from her Aboriginal heritage.

She was taken from her mother to be raised at the Moore River mission when she was three and a half years old.

As her birth was unregistered, her birth date was recorded as 1 July 1937 by the Department of Native Affairs. Her mother, Molly, named her Nugi Garimara, but she was called Doris after Molly's employer at the station, Mary Dunnet, who thought Nugi was 'a stupid name'. Pilkington was born at Balfour Downs Station, near the north Western Australian settlement of Jigalong.

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