It played a significant part in the expansion of settlement in the area south of Perth after the arrival of British settlers at the Swan River Colony in 1829.

After camping overnight, they sailed south down the Peel-Harvey Estuary to the southern extreme near the delta of the Harvey River, where they had an amicable encounter with some local Aboriginal people.

The group then exited through the ocean bar and sailed south along the coast as far as the Collie and Preston Rivers and the Leschenault Inlet before returning to the Peel-Harvey estuary on 28 November 1829.

Thomas Peel had left Britain with a promise that if he arrived at Fremantle by the beginning of November 1829 with 400 settlers, he would be allocated a grant of 1,000 square kilometres (250,000 acres), comprising much of the land on the south bank of the Swan River to Cockburn Sound.

Peel was offered an alternative grant from Woodman Point to the north bank of the Murray River and from the ocean to the Darling Scarp.

Peel's remaining settlers arrived shortly after and settled initially at Clarence before moving to the site of present-day Mandurah, which he named Peeltown.

These conflicts culminated in the infamous Pinjarra massacre in October 1834 during which an uncertain number of Noongar people of the local Pindjarup tribal group were killed.

Almost immediately after farming commenced, settlers realised that the soils surrounding the lower reaches of the river suffered badly from annual flooding caused by a very low fall between the base of the scarp and the estuary, a distance of about 40 kilometres (25 mi).