The Pacific Rugby League Championships wound up in a spectacular explosion of colour on Sunday when Tongan red and white flags waved furiously while challenging Australia in the final to the very end for regional supremacy.

But Mal Meninga, the driving force behind many of the Kangaroos wins over most of the past four decades, coached the defensive line with a stiff arm like he did as a player to end Tonga's late run in a 20-14 Kangaroos win in Sydney's west.

In the distance, behind the noise inside Parramatta Stadium from another collective of Pasifika voices, there are calls from Big Mal's ancestral homeland of a tiny group of islands where rugby league almost fades into obscurity.

Vanuatu officials are not shying away from an appeal to ask Meninga to guide its presence in the international game that has always been lacking.

Vanuatuan players on the islands have waited six years just to represent the Melanesian nation, and even after the pandemic, it's been just as long since they played in a World Cup qualifier, let alone play outside of their borders.

Ben Howard, a founding director of the Vanuatu Rugby League more than a decade ago, is hoping Meninga could ride his gut-busting runs and throw his line-breaking weight back from his playing days behind more international games.

Meninga has only found out since retiring from the game in 1994 that he holds a distinct Vanuatu connection, as a descendent of South Sea Islander Kanakas, stretching back to one of his great-grandfather, who in the 19th century was "blackbirded" to Australia on the lure of a free life.

Meninga was often incorrectly labelled as Aboriginal during the early parts of his playing career in the media and by fans.

Though quite proud of his heritage where he has visited Vanuatu on multiple occasions, Meninga is lukewarm over what role he could play to raise the profile of the sport to the 57th-ranked playing nation in the world.

Meninga was posed the question at the Kangaroos training camp on the Sunshine Coast should all Pacific nations be a part of the Pacific tournament.

"You want every game to be quality," Meninga said last month at a press conference ahead of the opening Pacific Championships game.

"Say Australia was to play Vanuatu, for example, if we beat them 100-nil, it might not quite generate the promotional benefit you'd like."

Why Howard is not asking the starting point internationally be Australia, the past outside of Meninga proves enough Australian-born players with a South Sea Islander descent suggests a Vanuatuan team could well be as competitive as the regular championships campaigner, the Cook Islands.

Gorden Tallis, Ken Nagas, Sam Backo, Jharal Yow Yeh, Rhys Wesser, Justin O'Neill, Travis Waddell and current South Sydney back Isaiah Tass are all of some Vanuatuan heritage, though a number of the players also having Aboriginal roots too.

"I think it's advantageous that Mal does have his heritage from Vanuatu, but also being the current Australian coach, as someone who could advocate for us, as he has been to Vanuatu on a number of occasions," Howard said.

"The NRL has a great Pacific program, which it is currently in PNG, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga.

"We'd love to see that extended to Vanuatu and possibly some of the other Pacific Islands like Solomon Islands as well."

Vanuatu, for all intents and purposes, supposedly competes under the Asia-Pacific region within the IRL that includes smaller Pacific nations such as Tuvalu and Howard potentially believes Tokelau and Niue.

Others in that qualifying confederation include the Philippines and Japan, while Hong Kong and India are also working towards official accreditation to join.

Although Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital city and its hub for rugby league, is closer to Brisbane than the Queensland capital is to Port Moresby, which may host an NRL side in the next few years, Howard believes Australia has an obligation in its development of the game across Melanesia to do more.

He is also very pragmatic on his thoughts of playing internationally.

"Let's be realistic: we are a long way from ever qualifying a team to a World Cup, but just to be able to play a qualifier would be huge for us because it's a lot easier to attract sponsors and media around those types of events," Howard said.

"It's definitely a goal of ours into the future and it definitely helps to put on a calendar and get government support, but at the other end of it is the reliance of sponsorship to play games, and Vanuatu has in the last year and a bit have had some problems with its national carrier going into liquidation, which has put huge pressure on the tourism industry in Vanuatu and a lot of the economy is built on tourism."

The plans of downsizing the World Cup by two teams does not help Vanuatu's cause and talk of a running a proposed World Series to run under the RLWC structure has softened in recent years.

As has reproducing the Emerging Nations tournament that was run in 1995, 2000 and 2018.

Held in Australia, the Solomon Islands won the last edition of the third-tier Bowl competition.

While the romantic notion that players of their ancestors' origins could return and play for Vanuatu just like Meninga's brother once did, Howard can only visualise one way out of developing from being a round-ball nation towards an oval-shaped ball.

"If we want to promote the game in Vanuatu, we need to promote it for Vanuatu players," he said.

"That's definitely our goal and it's up what other countries want to do and every country is in a different situation, and we understand that different people have different approaches.

"It's important that we have more locally grown players in our national team.

"It does create disadvantages like not being able to play many games until we can have full-heritage teams did have where if we had a full heritage team we could play five or six games every year in Australia like other smaller teams do.

"We don't have that luxury, so we have to look at what can we do and so it would be great to get some support from the Asia-Pacific group rugby league and International Rugby League, and I am sure rugby league can make that happen."