Aboriginal Australians have inhabited the Perth area for at least 38,000 years, as evidenced by archaeological remains at Upper Swan. The Noongar people occupied the southwest corner of Western Australia and lived as hunter-gatherers. The wetlands on the Swan Coastal Plain were particularly important to them, both spiritually (featuring in local mythology) and as a source of food.

The Noongar people know the area where Perth now stands as Boorloo. Boorloo formed part of the territory of the Mooro, a Noongar clan, which at the time of British settlement had Yellagonga as their leader. The Mooro was one of several Noongar clans based around the Swan River known collectively as the Whadjuk. The Whadjuk themselves were one of a larger group of fourteen tribes that formed the south-west socio-linguistic block known as the Noongar (meaning “the people” in their language), also sometimes called the Bibbulmun. On 19 September 2006, the Federal Court of Australia brought down a judgment recognising Noongar native title over the Perth metropolitan area in the case of Bennell v State of Western Australia FCA 1243. The judgment was overturned on appeal.

The Dutch Captain Willem de Vlamingh and his crew made the first documented sighting of the present-day Perth region by Europeans on 10 January 1697. Other Europeans made subsequent sightings between this date and 1829, but as in the case of the sighting and observations made by Vlamingh, they adjudged the area inhospitable and unsuitable for the agriculture that would be needed to sustain a European-style settlement.

Although the Colony of New South Wales had established a convict-supported settlement at King George’s Sound (later Albany) on the south coast of Western Australia in 1826 in response to rumours that the area would be annexed by France, Perth was the first full-scale settlement by Europeans in the western third of the continent. The British colony would be officially designated Western Australia in 1832 but was known informally for many years as the Swan River Colony after the area’s major watercourse.

On 4 June 1829, newly arriving British colonists had their first view of the mainland, and Western Australia’s founding has since been recognised by a public holiday on the first Monday in June each year. Captain James Stirling, aboard Parmelia, said that Perth was “as beautiful as anything of this kind I had ever witnessed”. On 12 August that year, Helen Dance, wife of the captain of the second ship, Sulphur, cut down a tree to mark the founding of the town.

It is clear that Stirling had already selected the name Perth for the capital well before the town was proclaimed, as his proclamation of the colony, read in Fremantle on 18 June 1829, ended “given under my hand and Seal at Perth this 18th Day of June 1829. James Stirling Lieutenant Governor”. The only contemporary information on the source of the name comes from Fremantle’s diary entry for 12 August, which records that they “named the town Perth according to the wishes of Sir George Murray”. Murray was born in Perth, Scotland, and was in 1829 Secretary of State for the Colonies and Member for Perthshire in the British House of Commons. The town was named after the Scottish Perth, in Murray’s honour. Beginning in 1831, hostile encounters between the British settlers and the Noongar people – both large-scale land users, with conflicting land value systems – increased considerably as the colony grew. The hostile encounters between the two groups of people resulted in multiple events, including the execution of the Whadjuk elder Midgegooroo, the death of his son Yagan in 1833, and the Pinjarra massacre in 1834.

The relations between the Noongar people and the Europeans were strained due to these events. Because of the large number of buildings in and around Boorloo, the local Whadjuk Noongar people were slowly dispossessed of their country. They were forced to camp around prescribed areas, including the swamps and lakes north of the settlement area including Third Swamp, known to them as Boodjamooling. Boodjamooling continued to be a main campsite for the remaining Noongar people in the Perth region and was also used by travellers, itinerants, and homeless people. By the gold-rush days of the 1890s, they were joined by miners who were en route to the goldfields.

In 1850, at a time when penal transportation to Australia’s eastern colonies had ceased, Western Australia was opened to convicts at the request of farming and business people due to a shortage of labour. Over the next eighteen years, 9,721 convicts arrived in Western Australia aboard 43 ships.

Queen Victoria announced the city status of Perth in 1856. Despite this proclamation, Perth was still a quiet town, described in 1870 by a Melbourne journalist as:

With the discovery of gold at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie in the late 19th century, Western Australia experienced a mining boom, and Perth’s population grew from approximately 8,500 in 1881 to 61,000 in 1901.

After a referendum in 1900, Western Australia joined the Federation of Australia in 1901. It was the last of the Australian colonies to agree to join the Federation, and did so only after the other colonies had offered several concessions, including the construction of a transcontinental railway line from Port Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoorlie to link Perth with the eastern states.

In 1927, Indigenous people were prohibited from entering large swathes of Perth under penalty of imprisonment, a ban that lasted until 1954.

In 1933, two thirds of Western Australians voted in a referendum to secede from the Australian Federation. However, the state general election held at the same time as the referendum had voted out the incumbent “pro-independence” government, replacing it with a government that did not support the independence movement. Respecting the result of the referendum, the new government nonetheless petitioned the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. The House of Commons established a select committee to consider the issue but after 18 months of negotiations and lobbying, finally refused to consider the matter, declaring that it could not legally grant secession.

In 1962, Perth received global media attention when city residents lit their house lights and streetlights as American astronaut John Glenn passed overhead while orbiting the earth on Friendship 7. This led to it being nicknamed the “City of Light”. The city repeated the act as Glenn passed overhead on the Space Shuttle in 1998.

Perth’s development and relative prosperity, especially since the mid-1960s, has resulted from its role as the main service centre for the state’s resource industries, which extract gold, iron ore, nickel, alumina, diamonds, mineral sands, coal, oil, and natural gas. Whilst most mineral and petroleum production takes place elsewhere in the state, the non-base services provide most of the employment and income to the people of Perth.

The central business district of Perth is bounded by the Swan River to the south and east, with Kings Park on the western end and the railway reserve as the northern border.^{[citation needed]} A state and federally funded project named Perth City Link sank a section of the railway line to allow easy pedestrian access between Northbridge and the CBD. The Perth Arena is a building in the city link area that has received several architectural awards from institutions such as the Design Institute of Australia, the Australian Institute of Architects, and Colorbond.St Georges Terrace is the area’s prominent street, with 1.3 million m² (14 million sq ft) of office space in the CBD.Hay Street and Murray Street have most of the retail and entertainment facilities. The city’s tallest building is Central Park, the eighth tallest building in Australia. The CBD until 2012 was the centre of a mining-induced boom, with several commercial and residential projects being built, including Brookfield Place, a 244 m (801 ft) office building for Anglo-Australian mining company BHP.

Perth’s metropolitan area extends along the coast to Two Rocks in the north and Singleton to the south, a distance of approximately 125 kilometres (80 mi). From the coast in the west to Mundaring in the east is a distance of approximately 50 km (30 mi). The Perth metropolitan area covers 6,418 km² (2,478 sq mi).

The metropolitan region is defined by the Planning and Development Act 2005 to include 30 local government areas, with the outer extent being the City of Wanneroo and the City of Swan to the north, the Shire of Mundaring, City of Kalamunda and the City of Armadale to the east, the Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale to the southeast and the City of Rockingham to the southwest, and including Rottnest Island and Garden Island off the west coast. This extent correlates with the Metropolitan Region Scheme, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Perth (Major Statistical Division).

The metropolitan extent of Perth can be defined in other ways – the Australian Bureau of Statistics Greater Capital City Statistical Area, or Greater Perth in short, consists of that area, plus the City of Mandurah and the Pinjarra Level 2 Statistical Area of the Shire of Murray, while the Regional Development Commissions Act 1993 includes the Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale in the Peel region.

Perth is on the Swan River, named for the native black swans by Willem de Vlamingh, captain of a Dutch expedition and namer of WA’s Rottnest Island, who discovered the birds while exploring the area in 1697. This water body was known by Aboriginal inhabitants as Derbarl Yerrigan. The city centre and most of the suburbs are on the sandy and relatively flat Swan Coastal Plain, which lies between the Darling Scarp and the Indian Ocean. The soils of this area are quite infertile.

Much of Perth was built on the Perth Wetlands, a series of freshwater wetlands running from Herdsman Lake in the west through to Claisebrook Cove in the east.

To the east, the city is bordered by a low escarpment called the Darling Scarp. Perth is on generally flat, rolling land, largely due to the high amount of sandy soils and deep bedrock. The Perth metropolitan area has two major river systems, one made up of the Swan and Canning Rivers, and one of the Serpentine and Murray Rivers, which discharge into the Peel Inlet at Mandurah.

Perth receives moderate, though highly seasonal, winter based rainfall. Summers are generally hot and dry, lasting from December to March, with February generally the hottest month. Winters are mild and wet, giving Perth a hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classification Csa). Perth has an average of 8.8 hours of sunshine per day, which equates to around 3200 hours of sunshine and 138.7 clear days annually, making it Australia’s sunniest capital city.

Summers are dry but not completely devoid of rain, with sporadic rainfall in the form of short-lived thunderstorms, cold fronts and on occasions decaying tropical cyclones from Western Australia’s northwest, which can bring heavy rain. Temperatures above 40 °C (104 °F) are fairly common in the summer months. The highest temperature recorded in Perth was 46.2 °C (115.2 °F) on 23 February 1991, although Perth Airport recorded 46.7 °C (116.1 °F) on the same day. On most summer afternoons a sea breeze, known locally as the “Fremantle Doctor”, blows from the southwest, providing relief from the hot northeasterly winds. Temperatures often fall below 30 °C (86 °F) a few hours after the arrival of the wind change. In the summer, the 3 pm dewpoint averages at around 12 °C (54 °F).

Winters are wet but mild, with most of Perth’s annual rainfall between May and September. Winters see significant rainfall as frontal systems move across the region, interspersed with clear and sunny days where minimum temperatures tend to drop below 5 °C (41 °F). The lowest temperature recorded in Perth was −0.7 °C (30.7 °F) on 17 June 2006. The lowest temperature within the Perth metropolitan area was −3.4 °C (25.9 °F) on the same day at Jandakot Airport, although temperatures at or below zero are rare occurrences. The lowest maximum temperature recorded in Perth is 8.8 °C (47.8 °F) on 26 June 1956. Daytime maximums below 15 °C (59 °F) occur approximately eight days per winter on average. It occasionally gets cold enough for frost to form. While snow has never been recorded in the Perth CBD, light snowfalls have been reported in outer suburbs of Perth in the Perth Hills around Kalamunda, Roleystone and Mundaring. The most recent snowfall was in 1968.

The rainfall pattern has changed in Perth and southwest Western Australia since the mid-1970s. A significant reduction in winter rainfall has been observed with a greater number of extreme rainfall events in the summer, such as the slow-moving storms on 8 February 1992 that brought 120.6 millimetres (4.75 in) of rain, heavy rainfall associated with a tropical low on 10 February 2017, which brought 114.4 millimetres (4.50 in) of rain, and the remnants of ex-Tropical Cyclone Joyce on 15 January 2018 with 96.2 millimetres (3.79 in). Perth was also hit by a severe thunderstorm on 22 March 2010, which brought 40.2 mm (1.58 in) of rain and large hail and caused significant damage in the metropolitan area.

The average sea temperature ranges from 18.9 °C (66.0 °F) in October to 23.4 °C (74.1 °F) in March.

With more than 2 million residents, Perth is one of the most isolated major cities in the world. The nearest city with a population of more than 100,000 is Adelaide, over 2,100 km (1,305 mi) away. Perth is geographically closer to both East Timor (2,800 km or 1,700 mi), and Jakarta, Indonesia (3,000 km or 1,900 mi), than to Sydney (3,300 km or 2,100 mi).

Perth is served by thirty digital free-to-air television channels:

ABC, SBS, Seven, Nine and Ten were also broadcast in an analogue format until 16 April 2013, when the analogue transmission was switched off. Community station Access 31 closed in August 2008. In April 2010 a new community station, West TV, began transmission (in digital format only).

Foxtel provides a subscription-based satellite and cable television service. Perth has its own local newsreaders on ABC (James McHale), Seven (Rick Ardon, Susannah Carr), Nine (Michael Thomson) and Ten (Narelda Jacobs).

An annual telethon has been broadcast since 1968 to raise funds for charities including Princess Margaret Hospital for Children. The 24-hour Perth Telethon claims to be “the most successful fundraising event per capita in the world” and raised more than A$20 million in 2013, with a combined total of over A$153 million since 1968.

The main newspapers for Perth are The West Australian and The Sunday Times. Localised free community papers cater for each local government area. There are also many advertising newspapers, such as The Quokka. The local business paper is Western Australian Business News.

Radio stations are on AM, FM and DAB+ frequencies. ABC stations include ABC News (585AM), 720 ABC Perth, Radio National (810AM), Classic FM (97.7FM) and Triple J (99.3FM). The six local commercial stations are Triple M Perth (92.9FM), Nova 93.7, mix94.5, 96fm, on FM and 882 6PR and 1080 6IX on AM. DAB+ has mostly the same as both FM and AM plus national stations from the ABC/SBS, Radar Radio and Novanation, along with local stations My Perth Digital, HotCountry Perth, and 98five Christian radio. Major community radio stations include RTRFM (92.1FM), Sonshine FM (98.5FM), SportFM (91.3FM) and Curtin FM (100.1FM).

Online news media covering the Perth area include TheWest.com.au backed by The West Australian, Perth Now from the newsroom of The Sunday Times, WAToday from Fairfax Media and other outlets like TweetPerth on social media.