The Terraces, designed by Richard Huxley and finished in 2000, are named in a gesture towards the Aboriginal inhabitants of this part of Sydney. It was believed that the Cadigal (or Gadigal) clan of the Eora people occupied much of Sydney south of the harbour, and numbered between 50 and 80 people when the First Fleet arrived in 1788.
The leading historian of Sydney, Shirley Fitzgerald, adds that the people living around Darling Harbour and the headwaters of the Blackwattle Creek may have formed a separate clan from the Gadigal. Tentatively named the Gommerigal, this clan has yet to be officially recognised, but as late as 1830, Absalom West recorded the existence of a Darling Harbour ‘tribe’.
Whoever they were, and whatever their collective name, many died in the smallpox epidemic that swept through the region in the year after the First Fleet arrived, and even fewer remained in the territory they knew as Cadi.