The area's Aboriginal name is 'Mookaboola' or 'Moocooboola', which means meeting of waters.[2]

Hunters Hill was named after John Hunter, the second Governor of New South Wales, who was in office between 1795 and 1800.[3]

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 cottage—later known as Fig Tree House—on 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 200 acres (81 ha) 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.[4]

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 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) from Radium Hill in South Australia, 100 km 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.[5] The refinery could produce about 5 milligrammes of radium bromide from a ton of ore, worth £20 per milligramme in 1912.[6] 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.[7][8]  (Wikipedia)