The subjects are often sprays of flowers with their leaves, isolated against a plain background. Typical of the plants she chose to depict are "Orthrosanthus laxus" (a small flower commonly known as morning iris), "Chamelaucium aorocladus" (known as waxflower), and kangaroo paw. She gave some of her paintings to a friend, Alice Moore, who picked specimen flowers for her in Kings Park. By 1901, Annie was exhibiting widely, with watercolours in the Western Australian pavilion at the 1900 Paris International Exhibition, the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition, the 1904 St. Louis International Exposition, and the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, London. The London show included no less than 50 of her paintings. She offered to sell some of them to Bernard Woodward, director of the Western Australian Museum and Art Gallery, but without success. To help support herself, Annie taught private painting classes at home from 1902 to 1906, advertising them in the local newspaper. In 1901, using the pseudonym 'Ahasuerus', Annie entered the 1901 Federal Flag Design Competition to design a flag for Australia; hers was one of over 30,000 entries. She was the first named and only woman among the five entrants who submitted similar designs, all of which featured the constellation of the Southern Cross. She split a prize of £200 with the other four other winners: Ivor Evans (a schoolboy), Leslie John Hawkins (an apprentice optician), Egbert John Nuttall (an architect), and William Stevens (a ship's officer). Suffering from depression, Annie had treatments at Claremont Mental Hospital for a few months in 1908 and again in 1918. In 1914, she and her husband moved to Serpentine, where Charles became a farmer and fruit grower. Annie died there of cancer in 1926 at the age of 60 and was buried in Karrakatta Cemetery in an unmarked grave. Charles died nine years later, in 1935, and the following year 124 of Annie's paintings were donated to the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 1991, her paintings were featured in a survey exhibition mounted by the gallery and subsequently reproduced in the resulting show catalogue. In 1999, in honor of her contributions to Australian culture, a new monument to Annie Dorrington was erected at the cemetery.