Ninjilki, bought by the Musee du qai Branly

Sell-out shows around Australia, including a recent exhibition in Melbourne,have made her one of the most sought after Indigenous artists in the country.

Now, the octogenarian artist has notched up another success with one of her works being accepted into collection of the Musee du quai Branly in Paris.

The leading French museum, which houses an extraordinary collection of Indigenous art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, chose her painting, Ninjilka (2006), to be part of its collection.

When the Musee du quai Branly opened in 2006 another Queensland artist, Judy Watson, was among eight artists selected to represent Australian Indigenous art.

Sally Gabori is a senior woman of the Kaiadilt tribe from the Wellesley Islands in the southern gulf of Carpentaria. Born in 1924, she was moved with other Wellesley Islanders to Mornington Island in the 1940s where she lived until the late 1980s when the Kaiadilt started to re-establish themselves on Bentinck Island. An accomplished maker of traditional handicrafts, Sally began painting in 2005 at the Mornington Island Arts and Craft Centre.

She is also a member of the Bentinck Island art gang, whose collaborative painting, Dulka Warngiid (Land of all), has been transformed into a major public art work at the Melbourne Recital Centre by the Victorian Tapestry Workshop as a gift to Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.

In May, Arts Minister Rod Welford announced as part of the Backing Indigenous Arts program $838 622 in funding for 2007-08 for nine art centres, including Mornington Island Arts and Craft.

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