Tales of drinking brandy by a creek

There is a story that Brandy Creek was named when Hugh Reoch and another man shared a bottle of brandy there one night, and, some say, threw the bottle into the creek. That could be true. When most of Gippsland's features were unnamed it did not take much to put a name to a creek.
Perhaps, too, it was named as a 'pair' for Whisky Creek. Brandy Creek is a name that has been both used and abused.
There is another Brandy Creek in Queensland, and there was a Brandy Creek gold mine in the Alpine National Park. I'm sure there were others.
Primary School 1417, Drouin West, was once called Brandy Creek, but it was also known at various times as Drouin, Drouin West and Buln Buln. That was within the space of only four years. This was before the railway passing to the south when Drouin was established on that line.
The school became Drouin West from 1878. The school opened in 1874 in an unlined classroom, 24 feet by 26, and like most other schools at the time it was unlined. There would have been a fireplace and the teacher would have spent winter standing in front of that fire. There also was a four-roomed residence, which not many schools had.
Brandy Creek is just west of Buln Buln, on Old Sale Rd, and in its infancy one would have expected it to grow into a district centre, but both railways passing through the area missed it, and when Old Sale Rd was no longer the east-west coach route, it began to fade away.
The years of the Great War more or less marked the end of Brandy Creek's prospects.
In 1873 John Lardner surveyed a track from Brandy Creek southward, running just to the west of Warragul (which was not really there at the time). The track he surveyed crossed the Gippsland Track and headed much further south.
Now the Brandy Creek Rd runs from Warragul as the continuation of Victoria St, north through Brandy Creek and on to Rokeby.
E.J. Brady's book "The Overlander – Princes Highway" (1926) says this of Brandy Creek, on the old road. "Before the railway was constructed coaches left Melbourne from the Old Albion Hotel (he added the 'Old') in Bourke St at 6am and with ordinary luck arrived at Brandy Creek in about 14 hours. The two hotels of Brandy Creek – closed long since – with their licences issued from Port Albert, did a roaring trade."
"Brandy Creek then had two banks, a cordial factory, a general store, chemist's and saddler's shops, a smithy and a house of accommodation. A church was built on the co-operative principle and services (were) conducted alternately by Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians."
"The Post Office was a log structure. Justice was meted out to wrongdoers by the only two honorary justices in the district. The police station was in charge of a mounted trooper, whose duties were many and varied."
Gold from Gippsland's fields had to travel by coach and the 'bullion coaches' travelled through Brandy Creek on a Sunday, with a mounted police escort and another policeman on the seat beside the driver.
I've not quite worked out why James Biram started his store, and later pharmacy, in the forest at Warragul in 1876, but it was an inspired choice, and probably inspired by the soon-to-be-built railway. Until then there was little that could be called Warragul.
James Biram's store, predated the railway, if only by a year or two,, and he had to move it when the railway was being built. His store seems to have been opened before McLeod's Track was cleared, so there must have been another route that helped him to locate his store.
With the coming of the railway a track was cut from Brandy Creek down to the railway alignment. The foreman of the crew clearing the track was a McLeod, and the track was McLeod's Track until it became Brandy Creek Rd.
Lardner's Track ran almost straight south from just west of Brandy Creek to the Princes Highway, which was then still called the Gippsland Road.
Brandy Creek was well-positioned to serve travellers on the Gippsland Track, to become the Gippsland Road and then the Old Sale Road. For a couple of decades it appeared to have a bright future.
Henry Boyce's Buln Buln Hotel was at Brandy Creek (one of two) and with the Buln Buln Protestant Church there seems to have been a progression in the naming, particularly as Brandy Creek slowly declined. By the start of the Great War Brandy Creek had shrunk to almost nothing and Buln Buln had prospered. When the railway came through Buln Buln in 1890 it was expected to bring prosperity to Buln Buln but it also meant many locals would use it to shop in Warragul and Buln Buln businesses found it a mixed blessing. Brandy Creek was not even on the line.
It had long been a centre for distribution of goods, and the mails, for selectors moving into the area, and there were many.
Production slowly moved toward dairying as the forests were pushed back, but Brandy Creek also exported honey and potatoes, meat and wool. We seem to have forgotten that sheep were in Gippsland in larger number than cattle, at least in many places, including Brandy Creek. A farmer named Honnecker also had a large area of strawberries.
Many of the settlers had mixed farms because there was a need to have something to sell – eggs, butter, cheese – while developing longer-term projects such as orchards. At Brandy Creek the soil seemed to be able to support almost anything.
The Buln Buln Protestant Church was a multi-denominational church (no Catholics were involved – this was a long time ago and prejudices ran deep) built in 1875. The Catholics built their own church in 1876 and Bradley's Hall was built in 1877, The future looked bright.
Henry Boyce called his Brandy Creek watering hole the Buln Buln Hotel, and first Brandy Creek church was the Buln Buln Protestant Church and there was an omen if ever there was one.
I'd love it if some reader could tell me more about the naming of Brandy Creek and, indeed, Whisky Creek.