[1] Jacana is located north of the Western Ring Road, south of Johnstone Street and between the Craigieburn railway line and Moonee Ponds Creek.

The name Jacana was applied to an area between Broadmeadows and Glenroy in the 1950s by the Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV).

The streets in the southern section of Jacana were laid out in 1923, when 861 lots were offered for sale on land which had formerly been owned by Duncan Kennedy, a farmer in the area from the mid-1840s.

In the late 1950s, a picture of the 'daily needs' shopping centre in Emu Parade appeared in the Housing Commission's Annual Report of 1958–59, presumably because it represented the progressive and ever-expanding nature of HCV operations.

The club was opened by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on 10 November 1975—the day before his dismissal by the Governor General, John Kerr.

During the 1970s, a major portion of what is now Jacana Reserve was a rubbish dump created to fill a valley containing a small tributary of Moonee Ponds Creek.

It contains the aforementioned shops and Sports Club (which includes a bowling green), small playgrounds, a school and extensive parkland.

The Association requested that residents donate two shillings each towards this project, and along with a series of local carnivals, had raised $2 000 by 1968.

St. John's Ambulance was the successful 'bidder' for this and was given the money towards a hall on land which had been donated by the Housing Commission to the Association.

ABS 2001 statistics for the Jacana reveal a suburb in which 60.4% of the population is Australian-born – the remainder from a variety of sources, only the United Kingdom (3.1%) and Italy (2.6%) exceeding 2%.