The son and his father have just, without knowing it, used the same words. “It is out of the question for anyone to come and take anything from our lands”released the first, Julien Creugnet, on the dark wooden terrace of the house he occupies at the back of the family butcher’s shop, this December 12.
“I want us to keep our land at all costs, it is out of the question to get rid of it”, declares, a handful of hours later, the second, Karlheinz Creugnet. The sixty-year-old breeder is busy on his vast property in Bouraké, near Bouloupari, in the south of New Caledonia. “The land, there is never enough to distribute it to all his children”he swears.
Cowboy hat on the head, same solid pace, father and son joined together for an afternoon of work in the heat. The pick-up is overflowing with guaiac piles, this wood so robust “that you don’t drive a nail in it”. Three kilometers of fence to renovate to protect the livestock, it will be a labor of several weeks.
On the Caillou, there is the capital, Nouméa, and, from Païta, going up towards the north, by the territorial road 1, which runs along the west coast, the bush: the Caledonian peasant world. The white “broussards” of the Creugnet family, descendants of a French soldier married to an Irishwoman, have been raising cattle since the 18th century.e century.
“We buy land. We are expanding. We make it fruitful. We don’t want to sell to make money. : Julien, 25, already had his own little herd when he left high school before the baccalaureate. He now has a hundred Brahman cows, selected by Australian laboratories to resist the tick. “Breeding is hard, slave labor. But it’s a passion, testifies the young man. All the meat produced on the island is sold, consumers would like even more.
For nothing in the world the bushmen will give up their place, nor will they abandon the existence without ostentation, needy but free, that they lead in the middle of nature. “There is no better life than this, space, private rivers, animals around us, the sea”says Julien, taking off his hat stockman (the man who herds cattle on horseback, Australia) to wipe his forehead.
Australian rural culture
His cousin, Darren Lacrose, 26, with a round face and Blundstone boots, is less fortunate, in the sense that he has to rent the 175 hectares on which he raises his 80 cattle: “I would like to have more land to myself to increase my herd, plant, invest. » Darren supplements his activity by working for others. Planting fences and riding horses every day… This is how he lives happily, outside from dawn to dusk, independent. “We were born into it, I will not change. »
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