For some years he lived at 586 Drummond Street, North Carlton, Victoria and had his first studio in Sydney Terrace in Wellington Parade, Melbourne, where he lived the first year. He did however have some 20 different home addresses during the half century he lived in Australia. From 1889 he had a contractual arrangement with the allegedly Florence-educated Italian landscape painter Charles Rolando (1844–1893) with Rolando in the role of employer as Rolando's deteriorating health required him to hire expert assistance with his painting and teaching of his art classes, while Scheltema needed a steady income. The wealthy Rolando had similarly been assisted earlier by George A. J. Webb (1861 – 1949), his brother in law, later a portraitist and landscape painter in Melbourne and Adelaide. They sometimes collaborated on the same painting. Scheltema inserted the staffage, mainly animals, but also vegetation, into Rolando's landscapes' settings. They also exhibited together, such as at the premises of art dealers Gemmell, Tuckett and Co of Collins Street, Melbourne in 1891. They would repeatedly take their students into the quite distant Victorian countryside or be invited to a student's family farm, to paint there. Some later art advertisements listed works as by 'Scheltema and Rolando'. Both artists signed those paintings. After Rolando's death in 1893, Scheltema continued to teach Rolando's students together with Webb for Rolando's wife Frances until early 1895. According to his letters he was a close friend of landscape and figure painter J. A. Turner (1850–1908), of teacher and painter T. F. Levick, the frame maker John Thellon and of school teacher in art and painter Robert Camm. With any of the latter three he would repeatedly go bush to paint, with or without some of his students. Travels Scheltema traveled and painted in Europe again, twice. In 1898–1899 he visited his native Holland, and visited Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Tunisia. Paintings from this trip were exhibited on his return at his studio in the Cromwell Buildings on Bourke St, opposite the General Post Office. In 1910, he also spent some time in France, Scotland, England and the Netherlands. Upon his return from this second voyage, he presented a solo exhibition from 1 to 24 September 1911 with 88 of his paintings in Tuckett Chambers, 359 Collins Street, Melbourne, including many painted on his last journey. The exhibition was opened by Sir John Madden, the fourth Chief Justice of the