ARTHUR Beetson taught Mal Meninga who he was but it was Norm Meninga who taught him where he'd come from and how far he could go.

As Big Mal readies his Maroons to run roughshod over NSW at Suncorp on Wednesday night, the lessons Mal learnt on so many long journeys beside his father will be the things driving him and his team.

Norm Meninga always seemed to be driving when Mal was a kid. And Mal was almost always with him, bouncing along beside Norm in the old Holden on the bumpy Burnett Highway between Monto and Thangool. It was nearly 200km there and back, three times a week, to captain-coach the Thangool Possums with Mal as the ballboy. Sometimes Mal would get carsick but it was worth it to see his father play.

Mal learnt many of his life lessons sitting next to his father in the car or walking in his father's long shadow in Bundaberg and Maryborough, Wondai, Monto and Thangool, where big Norm Meninga charged into opposition packs, a black man who loved playing rugby league and who loved proving himself in a white world.

He was a black man married to a white woman, when such things just weren't heard of in rural Queensland.

"In those days mixed marriages weren't really accepted by the wider community," Queensland's Origin coach told The Courier-Mail this week.

"But the way my father approached rugby league and life in general inspired people. He was very respected as a player but also as a person interested in the places where we lived. He was always trying to set up junior teams and teach kids how to play.

"The way he conducted himself helped break down a lot of prejudices - about how relationships could develop and how the community should interact."

Mal's parents, Norm and Leona, met at Wondai where he was playing football. Leona had been a crack sprinter and Mal says she was an enormous encouragement to him as a child.

"She had to work her way through the hardships of a black and white marriage and she never stopped helping her kids," he said.

Fifty years ago rugby league was the lifeblood of country Queensland and there was no tougher player than Norm Meninga, a 100kg prop with a good turn of pace and a grandfather who came to Queensland as a slave to cut cane and break rocks. Mal traces his heritage to Tanna, a tiny island off Vanuatu, 19km wide and 40km long that is home to lush vegetation, grass skirts and a smoking volcano.

His ancestors were among the 62,000 South Sea Islanders - or Kanakas as they became known - who between 1863 and 1904 were tricked or kidnapped into a form of slavery on cane plantations the length of Queensland. Mal's grandmother Ada, who grew up around Hervey Bay, also had African American blood.

Brian Courtice, 62, the former federal member for Hinkler, the electorate that takes in Bundaberg, has long campaigned for a museum to honour the South Sea Islanders who worked the farms of his area.

He says there is a weeping fig on his property that was used to hang one of the Kanakas at the turn of the 1900s when they were treated "appallingly" by the white population. "Even when I was a kid there was a lot of prejudice against black people in this area," he says. "But it was men like Norm Meninga who turned it around. He generated so much respect. Norm and South Sea Islanders such as the Eggmolesse brothers and Matt Nagas did great things for their community in helping them be accepted by the white population."

Mal was born in Bundaberg in 1960. He was walking at 10 months, a big baby with woolly hair, tottering on chubby, wobbly legs. His first steps were made following his father. He says that at 11 months he was trying to carry Norm's bag to football practice.

"I used to chase after Dad like a little puppy," he says. "I idolised him. I was mesmerised by everything he did."

In the 1950s Norm played for Wide Bay against touring sides from Great Britain, France and New Zealand, and was man of the match against the Poms at Bundaberg's Salter Oval.

"The French and the English both wanted Dad to move over there and play in their competitions," Mal says, "but he didn't want to leave his family so he stayed in Queensland."

Mal says his father coached league for 22 years and only missed out on a grand final once.

When Norm wasn't playing football he found work cutting cane on the coast and cutting wood inland, but his best work was in the front row.

"We left Bundaberg for Maryborough in 1961 because Dad became the captain-coach of the Wallaroos there and then we moved to Wondai, where he was captain-coach, and then to Monto in 1963.

"He played for the Monto Roos and it was in Monto where I got my first taste of playing league. He coached the school team and together with other parents started up a junior rugby league competition."

Norm taught Mal how to kick and chase, spin in the tackles, how to offload. And he gave him extra lessons in the Meninga family special - how to run right over the top of someone.

But he also taught him to be proud of himself and the content of his character, no matter what other kids at school said about his colour.

"He was a decent human being, always respectful," Mal says. "They are the things I learnt off him and Mum. To work hard and be respectful. Dad had a great work ethic so in the end people didn't care if he was dark-skinned or not."

Another Origin great, Gorden Tallis, who traces his South Sea Island background to Ambae in Vanuatu, says sport has always been a catalyst for social change.

"Sport is vital to all communities, especially in the bush," Tallis says. "There's not a lot of ... jobs so sport becomes super important.

"For Aboriginal communities, Torres Strait, South Sea Islanders and all the Polynesian communities it's vital to have something to look forward to and most of the time that comes through sport, because they're all very gifted athletes.

"Sport is tribal and it can bring people of all races together with one common goal and one common love."

Norm Meninga became captain-coach of Thangool in 1967. Rugby league was his life but that life as he knew it would soon end.

"Dad was a benchman, working at a sawmill in Monto, and a log skidded off the rail and smacked into his chest," Mal recalls. "The left side of his body was shattered.

"Dad had to have an artificial valve in his heart. He tried to battle on but his playing career was over and he was devastated."

The Meningas moved to a caravan park in Maroochydore and Norm went there with a broken heart.

He stayed involved in league, helping to set up the Maroochydore Swans junior club and venturing back to Bundaberg whenever he could, revisiting the past when his heart was strong.

Former Bundaberg player and coach Matt Nagas, 58, and a third-generation South Sea Islander, says Norm was always there to help fellow Islanders.

"He would often come to watch us play," Nagas says, "He was very encouraging, giving us advice on how to improve our game. All the young blokes looked up to Norm."

Mal left Maroochydore at 15 for the Queensland Police Academy.

Over the next 37 years he would travel many different roads and find many new drivers.

It was Beetson who encouraged him to further embrace his South Sea Island background to understand his true self and Mal has since become a spokesman for the South Sea Islander community.

At the police academy he also met a physical instructor named Wayne Bennett who put him on the path to greatness as a player and coach.

Norm Meninga's broken heart eventually killed him. He died in 1982 aged 47 and many of Mal's photos of his father were destroyed in the floods of 2010-11 that washed through his home at Chelmer.

But going into Wednesday's decider at Suncorp, Malcolm Norman Meninga still has the memories of those long drives through the Queensland bush and watching wide-eyed as his father ripped through tackles.

He's happy that his father lived long enough to see him follow his example of hard work and dedication to be part of that victorious first Maroons Origin side alongside Beetson in 1980. Happy and proud that he followed his father's advice and took the right road.

Originally published as The making of Mal