Obviously a lot of pressure from shareholders to go mining asap....

Obviously a lot of pressure from shareholders to go mining asap. Things never change, in my comments I was referring to everything being right and in place before the decision is take to commence mining. The questions are what have they got and what else do they need to begin mining?

Considerations being:

Enough tonnes and grade to get over the capital hurdle for a new mill option? E.g. economy of scale - you want a mill thats right-sized. Not a big stupid "hungry" overcapitalized mill that is impossible to feed, but also not a small dinky mill where you lose all the economy of scale for opex costs.

Mining method selection - would be good to have both open pit and underground ops to reduce bottlenecks? More complexity but also more optionality about what can go to the mill. At the moment looks like a small number of tonnes, but very high grade, grade can cover a lot of "sins"

Construction and capital costs - very hard to raise money at the moment and construction and mining costs are quite high - so a tough time to be building a mill and restarting a project, probably need to have enough cash as a safety net for common "ramp-up" issues that we have seen many fall over at the starting gate i.e. mining or grade issues, capital cost overruns, unexpected Met recovery/issues in the mill etc etc

Who knows - maybe the less risky option is to continue to drill and find more Ounces and convert resources to reserves? Waiting for a consolidation M&A event to bring a lot of the surrounding refractory gold under 1 ownership and possibly get 1 refractory mill built in a logical location near as much refractory ore as possible? Mining is an economy of scale business and good economies of scale usually gets projects happening and fractured isolated ownership and competing priorities are the enemy of new projects. Never underestimate timing in this industry because acting too early or before everything is planned is a path to failure and waiting too long and paralysis by analysis is also a real thing.

I guess the main takeaway for me was that RR was saying that refractory gold is just one of the dozens of variables and characteristics that dictate whether gold in the ground ever comes out at a profit or not. Like all the variables you can only do so much to control the risks that they pose and many are dictated to you by mother nature and you just have to deal with them (like orebody geometry, grade and metallurgy) but this company is in an interesting position in that it has some high grade gold, and has some existing underground and surface infrastructure that would reduce any restart capital costs, but is still missing the one big ticket item called a mill to produce gold. Without a big hungry mill demanding ore, these guys have the luxury of lower costs and can advance the project and timing to maximize future profitability, rather than run around like headless chooks trying to keep the mill fed today.

Its a frustrating industry because all the conditions are never "perfect" for a new gold project, you just have to build in enough margin for error so that it succeeds whatever macros get thrown at you (such as the price of gold, fuel, mining costs, exchange rates, interest rate/inflationary environment, cost of capital etc) and whatever site specific technical execution risks pop up (such as mining methods, permitting, geology, geotechnical failures, grade, recoveries, other enviro things like water and site logistics).

Being a mine engineer and with a lot of experience at various gold mines in WA means that RR is well aware of all these kind of things because he has probably seen them all at various operations and companies.