Howard Jacobson: Whatever happened to that sweet, broken-hearted Australian fatalism?

A propos absolutely nothing, the artist Sidney Nolan once put his arm around my shoulder, treated me to one of his wickedly collusive, world-weary smiles, and said, "You know your trouble, Howard? You try too hard."

I don't recall where we were, though it must have been somewhere formal because we were both in dinner suits. I know we were both in dinner suits because I remember thinking how much better he looked in his than I looked in mine.

I looked too new, I thought. Too eager. Whereas he wore his regretfully, almost philosophically, like a man who would much rather have been wearing something else ­ a smock and a beret, say, or one of those striped Parisian Apache dancer's polo-necks favoured by Picasso ­ but was always having to get back into his tuxedo to receive another of those honours with which the world could not stop loading him. Sir Sid.

Perhaps because I am more naturally a son than a father, I love the feel of an older man's hand on my shoulder. Around my shoulder, even better. If that man also happens to be someone I admire inordinately ­ and I took (and take) Sidney Nolan to be one of the supreme painters of the second half of the 20th century ­ I am in seventh heaven. For the briefest of moments history holds itself in suspense and the great man's greatness has no repercussion or continuance anywhere but here, a current of electricity passing through your collar-bone to your heart. History? For that briefest of moments you are history.

Add to that the fact of Nolan's being an Australian. No man communicates warmth to another man like an Australian. Only an Australian understands the melancholy of man-to-man communion. Just the two of you, womanless, in the garden of all delights, soon to be closed to you forever. Mateship, they call it over there. Even the word is broken-hearted. Doomed.

Australians use your name in a particularly intimate and touching way, too. They seem to lick it. Mine comes out Heward. Slightly sticky. Sad, sticky, doomed. Goodbye, Heward. See you, mate. All in all a heady mix for me, then, having Australia's greatest painter fingering my seventh cervical vertebra and licking my name into cadences of near unbearable pathos.

But why was he telling me I tried too hard? Too hard at what? Literature? Art criticism? Life? There was offence in the remark, had I chosen to take it. I may have revered Nolan's work, but I hardly knew the man. Who was he to know what I was like? Or to take the liberty of telling me?

It is, of course, or at least it was then, a peculiarly Australian judgement. All Englishmen tried too hard, didn't they? It was one reason we went to Australia in the first place, whether as convicts, migrants or tourists ­ to be taught to relax our hold. The first thing any Australian said to me when I arrived quaking in Sydney more than 30 years ago was, "No worries." The second thing he said was "She'll be right."

Who was "she", I wondered. I was worried sick about how to get my luggage off the boat, and here was this supposedly official person dressed like a huge schoolboy in pressed shorts and knee-length socks saying "She'll be right." Was "she" my cabin trunk? I'd heard about the way Australian men treated the female sex; if my cabin trunk was a woman there was a good chance she'd end up in the harbour. If, on the other hand, "she" was simply the state of things, how matters were organised over there, that wasn't much of an omen either.

I got the hang of it in the end. "She" was fate. The future. But dispel from your mind all ideas of the fates as the ancients conceived them ­ forget the Moira, spinning and snipping off the threads of life, forget Nemesis in her relentless chariot ­ the Sheila whom Australians understood by fate was the sweetest and most languid eventuality any culture has ever put its trust in. The country's vast and the sun's hot, so you might as well wait till "she" gets round to sorting it. In the meantime, kiss me, call me mate, and have a beer.

And it works. Two days after I'd landed, my trunk turned up, no worries. Little by little, the anxiety lines disappeared from my face. I became a fatalist, Australian style. No point killing yourself when all along "she" was seeing to it that things would turn out the way you wanted them. And not only "would" turn out but often already had. How's it going? She's sweet. She's apples.

I was back in the English way of doing things when Sidney Nolan encountered me looking over-earnest in my dinner jacket and told me what he told me. He'd been over here a long time himself, by then, and maybe hadn't noticed that Australia had changed and was now as serious as I was. Somewhat belatedly, I come to the subject of this week's column. The Australian cricket team, recently arrived ­ after a stop off in Gallipoli, wouldn't you know ­ to make mincemeat of our lot.

Aren't you sick of them already? Snub-nosed and snarling, brittle and bellicose, unwilling to laugh unless the joke's on a Pom, unable to lose. It's an illness, being unable to lose. It's a pathology. Wasn't that was Sir Sid was telling me? Relax, mate. Leave a bit of something for someone else. I return the compliment to his countrymen. You know your trouble, diggers? You try too hard.