Fairfield is a western suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Being in the centre of the Cumberland Plain, Fairfield is located west of the Sydney central business district and is the administrative heart of the Fairfield City Council (local government area) – despite a very small portion of it belonging to the Cumberland Council. Fairfield supports a mixture of commercial and residential developments, mostly characterised by medium-density buildings and some new high-rise apartments. Fairfield is one of the most multicultural and culturally diverse cities in Australia, with more than half of the residents having been born overseas, mostly in non-English speaking countries. The majority of the suburb's dwellers speak a language other than English at home, with the two most common ones being Arabic and Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. Fairfield is an ethnic enclave of Assyrian Christians (mostly from Iraq, and more recently Syria) and other Iraqis of various religious and ethnic origins. Fairfield also is home to a large Latin American presence. History For more than 30,000 years, Aboriginal people from the Cabrogal-Gandangara tribe have lived in the Fairfield area. European settlement, 1780s–1810s The earliest recorded white settlement in the Fairfield district is described in William Bradley's Journal where he noted an expedition from Rose Hill to Prospect Creek to determine whether Prospect Creek led to Botany Bay. Bradley described a place on the Creek where the water changed from fresh to salt with a drop of . The presence of salt water confirmed Prospect Creek's connection to the sea. Breton Gabriel Louis Marie Huon de Kerrileau, a soldier in the NSW Corps arrived in the colony in 1794, having fled France during the French Revolution. In 1807 he received a grant of in the centre of Fairfield, which he named Castel Paul. This was an Englished form of the town in which he was born in Brittany, Kastell-Paol, Saint-Pol-de-Léon in French. By 1814 Castel Paul had been combined, by subsequent owners, with several similarly sized grants to form a largely uncleared estate. Early development, 1820s–1920s The free settler John Horsley purchased the estate in that year and named it Mark Lodge, after family properties in Essex, England. Horsley, a Magistrate and Coroner at Liverpool (1825-1834), and his large family were among the pioneers of white settlement in the Fairfield District. Later, a Colonial Treasurer, Thomas Ware Smart (1810–1881) bought the estate and in the 1860s