Indigenous Before British colonisation, Cabramatta was the country of the Cabrogal people of the
Dharug nation. The term "cabro" (also pronounced "cobra" or "cabra") refers to the edible insect larvae found in timber around the region. The country of the Cabrogal clan extended from the areas of what is now Cabramatta and
Liverpool, east to the mouth of the
Georges River. The name "Cabramatta" (or more correctly "Cobramoora") means place of
cabro (edible insect larvae).
British colonisation In 1795, an early settler named Hatfield called the area 'Moonshine Run' because it was so heavily timbered that moonshine could not penetrate and offered no encouragement for settlers to explore the area. The dense woods was the marshy, flood-prone lower
Cabramatta Creek area that featured a closed
riparian forest, with its woodland reaching what is now Cabramatta Road. Though the origins of the name ‘
Moonshine run’ may have been linked to Hatfield's 'American rum' rather than the dense timber. The name Cabramatta first came into use in the area in the early 19th century when the Bull family named a property they had purchased 'Cabramatta Park'. When a small village formed nearby in 1814, it took its name from that property. A township grew from this village, and a railway was built through Cabramatta in the 1850s. It was used for loading and unloading freight and livestock. The railway station was not open for public transport until 1856; a school was established in 1882, and a post office in 1886. Cabramatta remained a predominantly agricultural township. It developed a close community relationship with neighbouring Canley Vale, and until 1899, they shared a common municipality.
Post WW2 immigration In 1948, Cabramatta's local government merged with the neighbouring City of Fairfield, and today remains governed by the Fairfield City Council. It evolved into a Sydney suburb in the mid 20th century, partly as the result of a major state housing project in the nearby
Liverpool area in the 1960s that in turn swallowed Cabramatta. The presence of a migrant hostel alongside Cabramatta High School was decisive in shaping the community in the post-war period. In the first phase, large numbers of post-war immigrants from Europe passed through the hostel and settled in the surrounding area during the 1950s and 1960s. They satisfied labour demand for surrounding manufacturing and construction activities, and eventually gave birth to a rapidly growing population in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The entrepreneurs were developing local enterprises. In the 1980s, Cabramatta and the surrounding
Fairfield area was characterised by a diversity of Australian-born children having migrant parents. Cabramatta High School was statistically the most diverse and multicultural school in Sydney, and a study showed that only 10% of children had both parents born in Australia. While many other parts of Sydney had their particular ethnic flavour, Cabramatta was something of a melting pot. During the 1980s, many of these migrant parents and their children – now young adults – were to settle and populate new housing developments in surrounding areas such as
Smithfield and
Bonnyrigg that were, until that time, market gardens or semi-rural areas owned by the previous generation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the migrant hostel – along with its peer in Villawood – hosted a second wave of migration: this time from south-east Asia as a result of the
Vietnam War. During the 1980s, Cabramatta was transformed into a thriving Asian community, displacing many of the previous migrant generation. The students of local Cabramatta High School represented all manner of people with Asian or European descent. By the early 1980s migration to Cabramatta declined, and as a result the migrant hostel and its many hundreds of small empty apartments lay prey to vandalism. Only the language school remained: it continued to teach English as a Second Language, until the entire hostel site was demolished and redeveloped into residential housing. A walk through the hostel before its demolition would have revealed closed and boarded-up corrugated iron buildings once home to kitchens, washing facilities, administration and so forth. ==Central business district (CBD)==