George James MacDonald (12 May 1805 − 21 December 1851) was a Commissioner of Crown Lands in the British colony of New South Wales where he founded both the city of Armidale and the town of Balranald.
He is mostly remembered for his role in leading a contingent of Border Police troopers in a large massacre of Indigenous Australians in the Clarence River region.
[1] In 1828, MacDonald was appointed to the position of clerk of stores with the commissariat at the penal colony of Port Macquarie on the north coast of New South Wales, organising supplies to the British regiment stationed there.
Although troopers of the New South Wales Mounted Police and armed employees from the nearby landholdings of the Australian Agricultural Company were deployed to punish the tribespeople, it was deemed insufficient to crush their resistance.
Therefore, in 1835 Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, authorised the deployment of 50 soldiers from the 17th Regiment of the British Army based in Sydney to undertake a punitive expedition against the Gringai.
[5] MacDonald, due to his previous experience at Port Macquarie, was appointed as chief commissariat and interpreter to the natives for this military operation which was commanded by Major William Croker.
[7] Follow up raids by armed settlers led by James McIntyre of the Australian Agricultural Company resulted in the capture of a Gringai man named Charley who was later hanged at Dungog for the murders of the five shepherds.
In 1839, he was assigned to the New England district and received an attachment of eight troopers of the Border Police to aid in enforcing the dispossession of land from the Aboriginal population.
Soon after establishing his lodgings, MacDonald set out on a punitive expedition against a group of Aboriginal people led by a man labelled "Anti-Christ" but was unable to locate them.
In an early morning raid, an Aboriginal campsite near the riverbank was attacked by his Border Police resulting in many casualties, the bodies of some apparently floating downriver past "The Settlement", now known as South Grafton.
[17] With MacDonald being absent from the New England district on a regular basis, the local squatters were often left to their own devices to arrange punitive missions against Aboriginal people.