Donald 

Attractive service town on the banks of the Richardson River
Donald is a town of some 1700 people laid out around a serpentine stretch of the Richardson River which is popular with local anglers. It is located 259 km north-west of Melbourne on the Sunraysia Highway and 118 m above sea-level. A neat and tidy town, it is essentially a service centre to the surrounding district where wheat, barley, fat lambs and wool are the main produce, although there has been some recent diversification into peas, canola, safflower and other crops. The massive wheat silos bear testimony to the central economic preoccupation of the Wimmera district.

Donald is known as the 'Home of the Duck' due to the prevalence of the waterbird on local waterways and the annual duck-shoot held in their honour. Perhaps another factor was the irresistible connection with that famous Walt Disney character.

The area is thought to have been occupied by the Wemba-Wemba Aborigines prior to white settlement. The first Europeans in the area were the party of surveyor Thomas Mitchell in 1836. When the expedition's botanist, named Richardson, fell in the river, Mitchell decided to name the waterway in his honour.

 

The town takes its name from the Donald family, the original European settlers who established 'Banyenong', a grazing station, in 1844. Their homestead, just 3 km north of the present townsite, was a social centre for settlers on the Richardson River in the 1860s. This was owing, in part, to the racecourse they laid out nearby which hosted the annual Banyenong races.

William Donald played an important role in the development of the shire but the township was established when Johann Meyer, a German migrant to the goldfields, set up a grog shanty on the future townsite in 1863. At that time it was known as 'The Bridge' or "Richardson Bridge'. Meyer later built two hotels and selected land for wheat-cultivation. The shire of Donald was established and named in 1864 and the nascent town was named Donald after a survey in 1866. Other German, Cornish and Irish selectors began to arrive in the 1870s - many of them refugees from the dying goldfields.