Interview with Chris Cairns March 14, 2019, page-19

The current resource over the Thurdays Gossan, while shallow and with limited cover, isn't likely to be mined as its low grade with copper with minimal gold credits, unless they use it as make-up ore for the plant at some point. The resource at Ararat is higher grade and could conceivably be mined as a satellite open-cut with the ore trucked back to a plant at TG but it's tiny in the scheme of what they are chasing.

As such, there's unlikely to be any open-cut based on what they've encountered and discussed to date. The porphyry if they find it will be at depth of 500m+ so open-cut won't be an option. Having said that even with an underground there's still the surface subsidence impact zone from a caving operation (fairly localised to the outline of the orebody) plus the surface infrastructure - shafts, tunnels, ore stockpiles, processing plant, product storage, tailings dam, water supply dams, workshops, offices etc etc. Pretty standard stuff and there are multiple examples of this kind of set-up in rural/agricultural areas in Victoria (maybe without the caving subsidence zone though) - Fosterville and Stawell come to mind.

The massive brown-coal dinosaurs in Victoria are in agricultural areas too (and operate year-round)