The park was created on the site of a former pipe works and meat preserving company, and retains historic buildings adapted to a museum (Melbourne's Living Museum of the West).
[3] Joseph Raleigh established a boiling down works on the banks of the river in the 1840s.
the buildings were adapted to the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company works in 1868, and then taken over by Humes Pipe in about 1911.
In the 1980s the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works purchased the site and developed it as parkland and home to the Living Museum, opening in 1984.
[4] The park sits on the floodplain of the Maribyrnong river below a steep escarpment of the western basalt plains.