A Mariah Carey song from the 90s is blaring in the sweaty locker room at Rockhampton's Browne Park, as first-time rugby league captain Latoya Harbin pulls on her bright orange boots.

"I'm trying to get hyped up for the big game," Ms Harbin said.

"I'm very nervous."

Mentally spurring her on is her great-great-grandfather Jimmy — a man from Vanuatu who came to Australia at the turn of last century to work for a pittance in Queensland's cane fields.

"I'm marking today by remembering him and the sacrifices he made. So I'm playing for him," Ms Harbin said.

"I'll be wearing that heart and that pride on my sleeve and remembering the struggles he endured when he came over.

Stretching out her glutes on the floor a metre away, Rachel Worcon has a very similar story.

"My family was part of the blackbirding maybe four generations ago," Ms Worcon said.

"That's why I'm here today and why I'm putting this jersey on.

"We've survived as one."

Founded last year, the Kanaka Proud Cup is an annual competition in central Queensland for rugby league players of South Sea Islander descent.

Ball boys in the crowd at the Kanaka Proud Cup 2018 in Rockhampton. ( ABC News: Emilia Terzon )

One of its founders, Marion Healy, said the Cup "empowered the next generation about who they are" and where they came from.

And the stories of that are, at times, undoubtedly troubling.

Starting in the 1860s, tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders from places including Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands came to Australia to work in indentured labour on plantations in Queensland.

Leading expert, Emeritus Professor Clive Moore from the University of Queensland, said while there was evidence that most of the 62,000 people sent to Australia came willingly, and signed contracts to work on the plantations, a small portion was lured or taken forcibly onto the boats — a practice known as blackbirding.

"We generally think in the first several years, maybe the first 10 years, from any island, there was a fair degree of illegality and total misunderstanding by the Islanders of what they were getting themselves into," he said.

When they got here, the working conditions were sometimes dreadful. People were discriminated against and treated like second-class citizens. And about one in 10 died from sickness.

"It's the closest Australia ever came to working people in conditions that were very similar to slavery," Emeritus Professor Moore said.

It is a history that broader Australia is only hearing about now. This is also the case for some of those in the locker room at Browne Park.

Another rugby player at the Cup, Alana Doak, has only started in recent years to hear the stories of what her ancestors went through. Rugby league has been one vehicle for learning about her family's past.

"It's been through Dad and being at the Kanaka Cup," Ms Doak said.

"Everybody is talking about what our ancestors went through and we're more aware of what happened.

"It's sad. We're Aboriginal as well and we've always known about the Stolen Generations. And now knowing more about our South Sea Islander side, it's hurtful to know what pain they went through.

"It's such a privilege to be here. Playing with a bunch of our mob, in front of our mob."

Young players on field at the Kanaka Proud Cup 2018. ( ABC News: Emilia Terzon )

The team's coach, trailblazing women's player Nicole Muller, describes the Kanaka Proud Cup as only partially about sport.

"Rugby league is just a little part of it. It's about getting together, meeting new people, sitting down and having a laugh, and just finding out where people's families are from and if you're related, which you often are," Ms Muller said.

"My role is not to just coach them on the field but also coach them off the field.

"What I've really done is give these girls a sense of pride of who their family was, no matter what that history was, and taking that and owning that history, always acknowledging and respecting the past and moving forward in the present."

Even the word Kanaka is a deliberate choice to reclaim pride.

The word was once a derogatory term for South Sea Islanders in central Queensland but the Kanaka Proud Cup's founders decided to use it, after consultation with senior elders.

"It was used that way to keep us down, but we use it to bring us up," Ms Healy said.

Sitting on the bleachers and screaming her guts out, Ms Healy said it was also just great to see young people on the field kicking around a footy.

"I just love my rugby league," she laughed.