But it is sedate. In the course of the novel's 300 pages, the Dibble–Gill character is barely developed. He is a rather too faithful observer, sketching the vagaries of colonisation without any real connection to them. This is not to be held against him, for if the reconstruction of Gill's personality is allowed to be accurate, it was this gaze-from-beyond that made him an excellent painter. He trained, as the book labours, as a silhouettist in London, and saw the shape of everything.

His sketches are superb visual records, and they have their own interpretative prowess, captured in a young urchin running through a scene of lifeless respectability of the racecourse; a distended squatter belly; the quiet subterranean emotional world of a copper mine. 'My pictures are full of voices,' writes Dibble.

But this is prose, and there may be a perfectly good reason that Gill's voice needs to be 'imagined': such a man would not write a memoir. The Profilist is rich in detail, but we want more than detail from a narrative.