Aboriginal culture

There are two traditional custodians of the Chipping Norton Lake area – the Tharawal people, which inhabited the southern side of the Georges River, and the Darug people to the north and west of the River.

White settlement

Chipping Norton was a farming area throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, named after an old English village by William Alexander Long. Long was born in Sydney in 1839, and travelled to England to study law, and later lived in Chipping Norton (Oxfordshire). He bought up a number of former land grants in the area at the turn of the twentieth century and his homestead 'Chipping Norton'. The horse stud on part of his property produced many fine young horses. He died in 1915 and in 1919 the government bought his estate and subdivided it into farming blocks for soldiers returning from the First World War.

Thomas Moore, another prominent early settler, was granted waterfront land that is now part of the park. 'The Homestead' within the reserve grounds was built in the 1880s. Chipping Norton Post Office opened on 1 September 1920 and closed in 1974.^[2]

As farming activities declined, the rich topsoil and underlying sand was mined. After 20 years of mining, the riverbanks were packed with dangerous pits and eroded banks. In 1977 the Chipping Norton Lakes Authority was set up to rehabilitate the area into parkland.