Qualla: Parramatta

Parramatta: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sardaka (talk) 08:37, 26 September 2013 (UTC), CC BY 3.0. The colony at Sydney Cove was running out of food. The sandy coastal soil grew almost nothing, and a thousand convicts, soldiers, and officials could not eat ambition. So in November 1788, Governor Phillip took a detachment of marines and pushed a boat as far up the river as it would go — to the furthest navigable point inland, where saltwater gave way to fresh and the ground finally looked like it might feed people. He named the defensible bend in the river The Crescent. The local people already had a name for the whole place: Burramatta, the place of eels, where saltwater and freshwater met and drew fish in their thousands. Strip away the skyscrapers, and Parramatta is still that meeting of waters.

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Image: Sardaka (talk) 08:37, 26 September 2013 (UTC) | CC BY 3.0

Parramatta: The Eel Place

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0. Radiocarbon dating traces human life here back some thirty thousand years. The Dharug-speaking people who lived along this river — the Burramattagal — knew it as country rich in food, the river and forest provisioning them through the seasons. The name itself is built from their ...

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Image: Nick-D | CC BY-SA 4.0

Parramatta: A Farm to Save a Colony

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sardaka (talk) 06:15, 23 January 2013 (UTC), CC BY 3.0. Phillip first called the settlement Rose Hill, after a British politician, before switching in 1791 to a version of the local name. The gamble on farming paid off in the unlikeliest hands. In 1789 a convict named James Ruse was granted land at what became Experiment Farm on the c...

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Image: Sardaka (talk) 06:15, 23 January 2013 (UTC) | CC BY 3.0

Parramatta: The Oldest Stones

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sardaka, CC BY-SA 4.0. Parramatta keeps Australia's oldest surviving European buildings. Governor Phillip put up a modest house on the hill of The Crescent; a larger residence replaced it in 1799, and Governor Macquarie substantially improved it between 1815 and 1818 into the elegant home that still st...

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Image: Sardaka | CC BY-SA 4.0

Parramatta: The River City Rises

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MDRX, CC BY-SA 4.0. For most of two centuries Parramatta was a country town with a long memory. Then, in the late 1990s, the first real skyscrapers went up, and the place transformed into the commercial heart of Greater Western Sydney. State agencies moved out from central Sydney; Parramatta Square ...

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Image: MDRX | CC BY-SA 4.0