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 language: burra for eel, matta for place. The same grammar shapes the names of neighbouring suburbs, Cabramatta and Wianamatta among them. To this day the phenomenon the Burramattagal understood holds true: eels and sea creatures still gather where the saltwater of the harbour pushes against the freshwater coming down the river, drawn to the nutrients that collect at the boundary. When the local rugby league club went looking for a symbol, it chose the eel. The team is the Parramatta Eels, named for a fish a people named a place for, thousands of years before the first ferry ran upriver.

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 condition that he make it produce — and Ruse became the first European to successfully grow grain in Australia, proving the colony could feed itself. Nearby, John Macarthur's Elizabeth Farm pioneered the wool industry that would one day ride on the sheep's back into national wealth. But the land was not empty, and it was not given freely. The Burramattagal were displaced, their people forced off as the farms spread. In March 1797 the Bidjigal leader Pemulwuy marched on the town with around a hundred warriors in what became the Battle of Parramatta, holding ground until he was shot and wounded — one chapter in a frontier war fought right here on the riverbank.

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 stands — the oldest surviving Government House anywhere in Australia, and for a time the seat of the colony's governors. St John's Cathedral, built in 1802, is the town's oldest church, its twin towers modelled on a church at Reculver in England at the suggestion of Macquarie's wife Elizabeth. The strange and the everyday sit close together here. In 1803 a convicted murderer named Joseph Samuel was led to the gallows three separate times — the rope broke, then the noose slipped, then a new rope broke — until the astonished governor pardoned him, reading the failures as the hand of providence.

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 drew thousands of bank and corporate workers into glass towers, one of which had to be redesigned shorter after aviation authorities raised concerns about the height intruding on controlled airspace. The new Parramatta is strikingly young and strikingly diverse — India is now the most common country of birth among residents, and on a given evening you might hear Hindi, Mandarin, Nepali, Tamil, and Telugu along Church Street, where 'Auto Alley' car yards give way to riverside dining near the convict-built Lennox Bridge. In December 2024 the first light rail line opened. The eel place keeps changing, but the river still runs through it.