The northern suburb of Ludmilla, Darwin, will get a major facelift as plans go ahead to turn a humble sporting venue into a stadium up to the standard of hosting National Rugby League games.
The Northern Territory government has earmarked $20 million to aid the development of Richardson Park, which will see the seating capacity of the stadium increase dramatically.
On top of this, the community will get a quality sporting venue to call their own, helping to put Darwin's outer regions firmly on the map, as NT Chief Minister Adam Giles explained.
"The government is committed to seeing Richardson Park used and enjoyed as a premier Darwin sport and recreation venue once more," he said. "At the moment it is in a pretty sad state and it will be wonderful to see it returned to a venue of choice especially for the bigger sporting events which need a rectangular field.
"But we're also keen to expand the horizons for the area and we've always said we'd like to develop Richardson Park as a community facility for a number of sports and community groups."
Sport stadiums are always exciting community projects, and will need to meet a high standard of civil engineering to meet what could turn out to be challenging contractor requirements. With thousands of tonnes of high specification non-shrink grout, likely to be required, the winning contractors will have both state and public expectations to live up to.
This is just one of a number of projects tabled in the Northern Territory's 'Sports Master Plan', which will look at all the state's sporting facilities and identify areas where funding can help improve the region's infrastructure, as part of a 10-year initiative.
Richardson Park's plans are currently being conceptualised for the final stadium design.