The Anzac and Sulva cemeteries are first signposted from the left hand junction of the Eceabat - Bigali Road. From this junction you travel into the main Anzac area. After 9.4 km's you will encounter a right turn onto a rough track 510 metres in length which leads to the cemetery. Shell Green was a sloping cottonfield on the seaward side of Bolton's Ridge. The cemetery is on the edge of a steep slope overlooking the sea.

The eight month campaign in Gallipoli was fought by Commonwealth and French forces in an attempt to force Turkey out of the war, to relieve the deadlock of the Western Front in France and Belgium, and to open a supply route to Russia through the Dardanelles and the Black Sea. The Allies landed on the peninsula on 25-26 April 1915; the 29th Division at Cape Helles in the south and the Australian and New Zealand Corps north of Gaba Tepe on the west coast, an area soon known as Anzac. On 6 August, further landings were made at Suvla, just north of Anzac, and the climax of the campaign came in early August when simultaneous assaults were launched on all three fronts. Shell Green was captured, and passed, by the 8th Australian Infantry Battalion on the morning of 25 April, but it remained close to the Turkish line throughout the campaign and was subject to frequent shelling.

Shell Green Cemetery was used from May to December 1915, largely by the Australian Light Horse and the 9th and 11th Infantry Battalions. It was originally two cemeteries a short distance apart, but after the Armistice the two were combined and enlarged when graves were brought in from the battlefields and from Artillery Road and Artillery Road East Cemeteries, Wright's Gully Cemetery and Eighth Battery Cemetery. In 1927, the graves of a number of servicemen who died in 1922 and 1923 were also brought to Shell Green from the latter cemetery. The cemetery now contains 409 First World War burials, 11 of them unidentified.