The area's
Aboriginal name is
Mookaboola or
Moocooboola, which means . Hunters Hill was named after
John Hunter, the second
Governor of New South Wales, who was in office between 1795 and 1800. The area that is now Hunters Hill was settled in 1835. One of the earliest settlers was
Mary Reibey, the first female retailer in Sydney. She built a cottagelater known as Fig Tree Houseon land that fronted the Lane Cove River; Reiby Street is named after her. During the 1840s,
bushrangers and
convicts who had escaped from the penal settlement on
Cockatoo Island would take refuge in Hunters Hill. Many of the suburb's early houses were built from the local sandstone. A number were built by Frenchman Didier Numa Joubert (1816–1881), who bought of land from Mary Reiby from 1847 and used seventy stonemasons from Italy to construct solid artistic houses. Hunters Hill was proclaimed as a municipality on 5 January 1861. The first
Gladesville Bridge constructed in 1881 linked the area to
Drummoyne and the southern side of the
Parramatta River. In the early 20th century, there was an industrial area in Hunters Hill. One of the industries was a radium and uranium refinery operating from 1911 to 1915. The concentrated ore was transported over from
Radium Hill in South Australia, west of Broken Hill. At the time, uranium was considered a byproduct, but very small quantities of radium (which had been discovered in 1898) were very valuable. The refinery could produce about of
radium bromide from of ore, worth
£20, equivalent to in , per milligram in 1912. The area is now residential, Nelson Parade, and demands to remove it saw a plan developed to transport it to an old quarry area besides Badgerys Creek that was licensed to receive low level
radioactive waste; however all such planning ceased as Badgerys Creek International Airport was decided upon to proceed. In 2021, following extensive community consultation and research, Hunters Hill Council received planning approval to remediate the site of the Old Radium Hill processing plant and dispose of the contaminated material at a licensed facility in the United States of America. This approach had strong community support and would resolve a long-standing issue that the private sector created. Remediation works began in September 2021. In the later stages of the project the waste material from the site was taken to a facility in Western Australia after it was granted a license to operate in 2023. The excavation and removal of the waste material was completed in August 2024. The
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation supervised the excavation and packing of the contaminated material into sealed bags and containers before it was transported for disposal. In 2003 Where 2 Technologies developed a computer mapping application, later
Google Maps, in a bedroom in Hunters Hill. == Heritage listings ==