The project

Manigurr-ma Village — named after the Larrakia word for the Stringybark tree — is a 67-hectare workforce accommodation village at Howard Springs, 20 kilometres east of Darwin, built to house up to 3,500 construction workers for the INPEX-operated Ichthys LNG Project. Delivered by Laing O'Rourke for JKC Australia LNG across four stages, the village was masterplanned and designed by AECOM and completed in 18 months — one of the fastest large-scale workforce accommodation programmes ever delivered in Australia.

The Ichthys LNG Project, a joint venture between INPEX, Total, and a consortium of Japanese energy companies, was one of the most significant resource projects in the world — producing 8.4 million tonnes of LNG per year from a gas field in the Browse Basin, 220 kilometres offshore Western Australia. The Howard Springs village was the operational base that made it possible.

What was delivered

The completed village provided 3,500 beds across modular accommodation units, supported by a full suite of community and recreational facilities — swimming pool, 50-seat cinema, gym, library, running track, beach volleyball, indoor cricket, and landscaped open spaces. A 24/7 medical centre, catering, laundry, cleaning, and security services supported the full village operation. Around 60 per cent of the capital expenditure was committed to local NT contracts, with approximately 95 per cent of the construction workforce drawn from the Territory.

The modular accommodation units were manufactured offshore in China using a DfMA delivery model — designed, procured, quality-controlled, and shipped to Darwin for assembly on site. The complexity of managing the design, manufacture, logistics, and programme across an international supply chain, while maintaining quality standards and delivering to an aggressive programme, made this one of the most technically demanding workforce accommodation programmes undertaken in Australia at the time.

The outcome

Manigurr-ma Village opened to residents in September 2013 and reached full operational capacity in 2014 — on programme and to a standard that earned industry recognition as an award-winning design.

The offshore manufacturing programme in China was considered the most successful component of the entire Ichthys LNG development at the time. Every module was delivered to a pre-committed schedule aligned to sea logistics cycles — an achievement made more significant by the recovery of three months of programme slippage that existed at the point of engagement. That recovery required a fundamental reset of the manufacturing sequence, logistics plan, and quality framework — delivered without compromising the standard that the programme demanded.

The village was vacated in 2019 following completion of the Ichthys LNG construction programme and subsequently handed to the Northern Territory Government, where it later served as Australia's Howard Springs quarantine facility during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our role

Brad Eathorne served as Project Leader for the DfMA modular accommodation component of the programme — responsible for design, procurement, programme leadership, quality control, logistics, and handover of the offshore-manufactured accommodation modules from China. The engagement included establishing and leading a team of quality inspectors in China, implementing a first-of-its-kind iPhone-based quality inspection tool that achieved 100 per cent coverage of high-risk inspection points, and rescheduling deliveries in response to site delays — saving more than $2 million while maintaining quality and programme targets.