The accounts of early settlers also provide information about Aboriginal people living in the Cooks River area. These accounts describe fishing practices, dwellings people lived in and tools used by Aboriginal people.

Aboriginal people continued to live in the area around the Cooks River after the arrival of Europeans. Clan members from other areas such as the NSW south coast moved into Sydney, transforming the make-up of the traditional groups living in the Marrickville LGA.

Until 1788, the Cooks River and its environment was relatively undisturbed by man. The Aboriginal population, estimated initially at about 1500 by Governor Phillip, lived within their tribal boundaries in the Botany Bay area by fishing, gathering shellfish, some hunting, and subsistence cropping, in a regularly shifting pattern.

The bush was intermittently swept by fire, sometimes deliberately lit to clear out the undergrowth and make travel on the hunt easier; but all this did not disturb the river's ecology to any destructive extent, as the Aboriginal people understood well that their survival depended on maintaining the natural vegetation and wildlife.