I would expect the flare to show through light cloud on the SIR...

I would expect the flare to show through light cloud on the SIR bands. Prior images show them a bit more diffuse through lighter cloud, could be either on this image but probably no flare.

To recap:
1. The Velkerri shale has gas in it.
2. It produces to surface reliably across tests.
3. This well produced to surface during what can very reasonably be assigned to a brief cleanup operation. I would add that this is within the range or scale of prior testing flares. This provides me no pause for the well's prospects.
4. Soaks can be entirely pre-cleanup, post-cleanup or both. Clean-up means flowing the well till the water rates fall off and the gas rates rise. There is no real end unless you continually produce it. At that point its all in the rear-view mirror and somewhat academic
5. While I haven't look to see if it's been said for this specific well or not, the practice of running tubing following an initial clean-up is virtually universal. Only for a brief initial production period or during initial clean-up are well generally flowed without tubing. Tubing serves to ease the lifting of water out of the well by increasing the velocity of the water/gas mix.
6. From a safety/operational standpoint, any well operation should be performed at the lowest reasonable pressure. Thus, cleaning up the well to some degree before running tubing is prudent from a safety standpoint. The other end of this compromise is that you don't want to draw off all your pressure and hinder micro-fracturing during the shut-on/soak or whatever an operator calls it.
7. There is nothing from this shale, aside from the terrible and structured Amungee location that bothers me. Well, the Pangaea acreage on the western portion of the basin appears dead as dead gets...but that's an entirely separate sub-basin across a major fault from this. With shale experience, one would need to be the eternal pessimist to be concerned about this well.

My take - they've cleaned it up, run tubing and are shut-in for soak or other operational reasons. I'm not suggesting anything in 'other operational reasons' aside from sensible things like "it will cost us $500k extra to have equipment x on site for the extra time, let's just wait until we're ready to frack or do leak mitigation on 3H" or something along those lines. There's cash and operational efficiency to be gained and our collective anxiety over the result won't show up on the balance sheet.

I'd also add that it's not appropriate for an effort of this magnitude and scale to be swung around be relatively irrelevant press releases on whether tubing as been run, the well is being soaked etc. The enterprise value doesn't hang on individual wells or even pads. We're already way passed that.