Because Bardon wrote the first accounts of the Papunya painting movement, they tend to stress his role in facilitating the artists’ work. Recent scholarship has shown the central role that Tim Leura played in maintaining the organization in its early days, ensuring artists had materials and negotiating with non-Indigenous agents. He was also bringing together a disparate range of themes and motifs in order to express his culture to outsiders.

In An Old Person's Dreaming, Leura offers a more personal connection to place, depicting the site where his father died. Leura was unusual among Papunya painters for including portraits of his family members in his paintings, and it is likely that the central image in this work is his father Barney Turner Tjungurrayi.

The yala (desert yam, ipomoea costata) is an important source of food and moisture in the desert. Visible as a looping, vinelike shrub, the plant’s growth above ground is mirrored below the earth with radiating roots producing large tubers that retain their moisture long after rain.

Yala are located via telltale cracks in the earth created by the plant's tubers as they swell. The yala tubers are then harvested with robust digging sticks. The succulent tubers can sustain travelers on extended marches across otherwise-waterless ground. Yala is strongly identified with masculinity and men’s Law. The travels of Yala ancestors across a vast swathe of country are celebrated at various sites where ceremonies are performed to ensure the health, abundance and expansion of the species. The plants are conceived as radiating from each of these totemic centers to spread across the country. Yala’s vigorous radial growth provides a perfect illustration of the widespread Indigenous concept that ritual observation at particular totemic sites ensures the maintenance of that species across the broader landscape.

The influence of Water ancestors, featured in paintings by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, extend from the sites they depict along songlines and into adjacent areas, where floodwaters create ideal conditions for the emergence of further totemic food plants, including yala. In Yam Spirit Dreaming (1972) Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri subtly integrates human presence, suggesting the intertwined connection between people and the ecological wellbeing of their country. The sinuous lines that emanate from the center of the work simultaneously denote the underground roots of the original plant (with its associated tubers) and the principal path taken by the ancestral Yala to and from this site. The Yala ancestor shares both human and vegetable attributes, and at different stages of his travel, either human or vegetative characteristics come to the fore. The shape-shifting outlines of tubers emphasize the anthropomorphic forms of yala, terminating in a virtual community of mandrake-like figures, men hunting, women carrying coolamons and objects that suggest the typical ovoid form of sacred objects. Tim Leura would continue to examine the tension between symmetry and the infinite variability of natural forms throughout his career.