Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Elsie May Cleaver was born on June 5th 1921 in the small Monaro town of Majors Creek. She was the fourth of six children with two older brothers, an older sister and two younger sisters.

As a child she lived on a small sheep farm and didn’t start school until she was seven because her father felt that she was too small to walk the two-mile distance to the school. She was fortunate because her mother was a trained school teacher and she started to teach the children before they started school.

Elsie enlisted in early 1943 and, after 6 weeks of rookie medical corps training at Ingleburn, she was sent to Heidelberg Military Hospital in Melbourne. There they treated soldiers returning from the Middle East, many with horrific wounds, under difficult conditions with none of the antibiotics of today or plastic surgery.

She was then posted to the Atherton Tableland where she spent around 12 months with 2/6 Australian General Hospital (AGH), which had returned to Australia from the Middle East with the 9th Division after Japan entered the war and advanced south. There, she treated the training wounds of the soldiers preparing to go to New Guinea including broken bones from parachute training when wind blew the soldiers into trees and, of course, tropical illnesses – malaria and dengue fever.

It was while posted to the Atherton Tableland that she first met her future husband, Albert Shelley.

In 1945 she was posted from the Atherton Tableland to Borneo. By the time the 2/6 AGH reached Morotai, the allied invasion of Borneo had begun and she spent some time at the casualty clearing station for the invasion at Morotai. Her brother Les, a soldier with the 2/24 Infantry Battalion was at Morotai at the time and was waiting for her when the ship arrived.

When the war ended, Elsie was at a hospital established at Labuan in Northern Borneo. There they treated the POWs from Singapore before sending them back to Australia. She remained there for about 4 or 5 months before returning to Sydney and Concord Hospital and was eventually discharged from the army in late 1946.

Four years in the army had some interesting implications. She often proclaimed later in life that she would not go camping or wear pants because she had done enough of both those things during her time in the army.