The natural drainage from the local geology and culturally modified landscape is the area’s greatest asset.  This feature contributed to its former function as grazing land and Sydney’s one-time source of water. 

Twelve ponds, fed by sandstone and concrete lined channels, have replaced the original swamp. As well as channelling surface runoff there is natural seepage from the sandstone slopes and from the upslope water reservoirs.

The water resources of this area are likely to have been important to the Indigenous people living here before 1788 but there is no known detailed information or clear descriptions of direct observations of people utilizing the land and resources of the sand hills and wetlands on the eastern Sydney peninsula from early colonial writings. 

Although the Pre-colonial archaeological report prepared for the present Indigenous history and heritage study did not investigate the nature of the country that existed before the sand hills in the area began to form, it indicated that Centennial Parklands may have been at the headwaters of small freshwater creeks which ran down sandstone valleys and into a river flowing across what is now the northern side of the then-dry Botany Bay, through present-day Botany Heads and over a short, then-dry section of the continental shelf to the ocean.