in Australia. His paintings were not just pleasant pictures, but tended to tell a story in well captured typical Australian bush settings, sometimes with fog, haze, dust or other atmospheric effects. Although he had been educated in Europe he immediately developed a sharp eye for the colours and textures of the Australian landscape, as he did not only paint outdoors all over rural Victoria, but studied individual tree and shrub species up close. Many of his rural works focus on or include one large gum tree, as a uniting feature. He would explain the rural life in paintings which others of the period, such as Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson, had explained in writing indeed poetry. In 1895 one of his paintings, Driving in the Cows was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. Since then all Australian State Galleries and the National Gallery of Australia would own at least one of his paintings, as do the larger regional galleries in Victoria, such as those at Ballarat, Benalla, Sale, Hamilton and Bendigo. The latter gallery (then called Sandhurst Art Gallery) was the first public gallery to have a work of Scheltema in its collection, gifted to it shortly after his arrival by a Bendigo solicitor, who had traveled to Melbourne to buy the best painting he could find as his donation. Called 'Going to Camp', it shows 12 oxen pulling a cart with a load of wool bales in front of a great sunset also lighting the back of the moving bullock train from reflection of the sun in the stream behind the animals, like a 'double contre-jour'. It is also the first known contre-jour painting in Australia showing the effect of the diverging bovine leg shadows. The Hamilton Gallery keeps five livestock-in-landscape pieces by Scheltema in their collection. His exceptional chiaroscuro work "The Sundowners", showing three men at night lit on just one side by a fire in the bush, shows he could paint an almost physically felt suggestion of different temperatures in different parts of the painting. The Benalla Art Gallery owns his painting 'Full Swing on the Board', the first Australian painting showing mechanized sheep shearing. It was commissioned by Mr. and Mrs. Victor Armytage of the property "Ingleby" at Winchelsea, Victoria, now heritage listed. Mr Armytage, who paid eight pounds for it, is shown in the picture as one of the shearers and it was painted