[2][3] By the time European settlers arrived, Māori called it Heretaunga,[2][3] a name adopted by an Upper Hutt suburb and secondary school.

[6][5] At the top of the Upper Hutt floodplain, the river makes a sharp turn against the bedrock at the foot of the cliff at Maoribank to flow down the valley.

Water flows down into the aquifer from a five-kilometre stretch of the Hutt River south of Taita Gorge, at the rate of 1000 litres per second.

[7] The water level in Wellington Harbour was much lower 20,000 years ago, and the ancient Hutt River used to flow down a paleochannel to the east of Matiu / Somes Island as far as the present-day Miramar Peninsula.

State Highway 2 follows the course of the river for most of its length, with the exception of the Kaitoke Gorge and the head waters, before crossing the Remutaka Range into the Wairarapa.

In the early nineteenth century, the Hutt River was deeper than it is now and navigable for some distance by large canoes and boats.

Māori would take produce grown in the Hutt Valley down the river by canoe and across the harbour to Wellington city.

[11] Writing in 1880, James Coutts Crawford described the river as he had seen it in 1840:The alluvial land on the banks of the Hutt was at this time covered by a dense forest, many of the trees being of gigantic size.

The river being much narrower that it is now, while the valley was under forest, the flood waters would necessarily be held back, and the scour and rush of gravel and sand that has since contributed to widen it did not then prevail to nearly the same extent.