The Australian newspaper quoted one of them, Vanuatu policeman Pakoa Rudy Rolland, as saying the problem had become so bad that more than 480 Aboriginal descendants on Tongariki were living as second-class citizens with restricted access to land and education.
The group is believed to have descended from Aborigines taken back to Vanuatu by sugar plantation workers, who themselves had been blackbirded, or enslaved by Queensland plantation owners in the 19th century.
