Born in Adelaide, Reg Ellery was educated at East Adelaide state school and St Peter's College where he was a contemporary of Howard Florey. An only child, he moved with his parents to Melbourne, where his father became town clerk, and he entered the medical faculty at the University of Melbourne. After a somewhat prolonged passage through medicine, including a break in 1918 when he enlisted in the Flying Corps, he graduated in 1923.

He became a psychiatrist almost by chance. Joining the Department of Mental Hygiene in 1923 to take a post as medical officer at Kew Asylum, he remained with the Department and served at several mental hospitals until 1929. From 1929 to 1931 he was pathologist to the Department. During much of this nine year period in mental hospitals he was a clinical assistant in psychiatry at the Melbourne Hospital, and in 1928 he was the Beattie Smith lecturer at the University of Melbourne. At Sunbury he worked under JK Adey and in 1925 made the first trial in Australia of Juarreg's malarial therapy for general paralysis of the insane. Later he was one of the first in Victoria to use insulin and cardiazol convulsive therapy - always on the look-out for something new in a field with, in those days, few effective therapeutic possibilities.

From 1931 Ellery entered private practice as a psychiatrist, which gave him more scope to deal with the neuroses as well as the psychoses. He was honorary psychiatrist at the Alfred Hospital 1931-46 and consultant alienist at the Women's Hospital from 1931. He was a member of the British Psychological Society and promoted the formation of the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis of which he became secretary and director. He was a regular contributor to scientific meetings and to journals and soon built up a large practice and established a reputation as a leader in this developing field. After a visit to Europe and Russia in 1937 he became a vocal supporter of communism. This led to some degree of professional isolation for a time and Ellery believed it accounted for his failure to be reappointed to the Alfred Hospital in 1946. His enthusiasm for the communist cause diminished in later years.

Ellery's wife, Mansel Kirby, was a talented harpsichordist. He himself was a creative person with a great love of music and literature and a facility for description in writing. In his undergraduate days he had seriously considered journalism as an alternative to medicine and had become associate editor of the Melbourne University Magazine and editor of Speculum, the medical undergraduates' publication. Throughout his life he continued to write, producing many articles in the Medical Journal of Australia and several books.

His last book, The Cow Jumped over the Moon, published in 1956 shortly after his death, is an eloquent account of the psychiatry of his day and of his life from early childhood to his last crippling arthritic illness which immobilised him and finally led to his death. It combines the vision of the poet, the understanding and analysis of the psychiatrist and the polished language of the litterateur. Full of imagery and beauty of expression, it gives Ellery life and spirit as no biography such as this can hope to do.