Gordon Park takes its name from General Charles Gordon, and most of the suburb's street names relate to him, the armies he served with, and their theatres of operation. The Gordon Park housing estate was formally put up for sale in 1890, though lots within the estate had already begun selling as early as 1886. Before that, the Barron family were among the area's first European dairy farmers, with a homestead believed to date from the 1880s that stayed in the family until 1917, when it was sold to developers and subdivided. The Turrbal clan occupied the northern side of the Brisbane River, including Gordon Park specifically, long before any of this European settlement.

Despite being subdivided in the 19th century, Gordon Park's main development character is interwar rather than Victorian, and it's always been something of a quiet suburb, overshadowed by its larger, more populous neighbours Lutwyche, Kedron and Stafford. A branch tram ran through the suburb from 1940 until buses replaced it in 1969, and Gordon Park was actually reduced from a suburb to a mere locality during the 1980s-90s before regaining formal suburb status in the late 1990s. Throughout all of that, Kedron Brook has remained a constant: it forms the suburb's eastern and southern boundary, and creek-adjacent soil holds moisture for far longer after rain than inland ground, which is exactly the condition subterranean termites look for.

For homeowners, that means a Gordon Park property's termite risk tracks closely with two things: how old the house actually is (most of the suburb's core housing dates from the interwar decades following that 1886-90 estate sale) and how close it sits to the Kedron Brook boundary.