They used these markers as code to their mates.

As they traipsed from farm to farm, offering their labour in return for a feed and a dry place to sleep, they judged the generosity of the household.

The gatepost of each farm was chalked.

If the swagman, having chopped a load of firewood or helped strain a fence, found himself with a plate of mutton and potatoes, a cup of tea and the shelter of a shed – or even, great mercy, a bed – he adorned the farm's gatepost with a tick.

If the footsore traveller was turned away, or given a day's hard labour with nothing at the end of it but a corner of a dry bread and told there was no overnight refuge, a large cross would be chalked by the gate.

It barely mattered if the farmer rubbed away a cross. Word would be out, up and down the track and around the district. "Don't bother. Here lives a mean coot," the cross may as well have said.

Eighty years later, with swaggies not much more than exotic inhabitants of old bush poems and romanticised books, the cross remains against some families in country districts.

"Oh, them," an old woman snorted to me this week when the name of a notoriously stingy farming family came up, "They'd use the same teabag for a month!"

My mother, bless her, carried a spirit of generosity through her long life.

Every now and then, a woman known all around as one of those unfortunate souls who need to anaesthetise the pain of living turned up at our door. She would be travelling by foot and thumb between towns, desperate to find a bar that would serve her a drink.

It was as if there were a tick on our gatepost. My mother always brought her in, made her a meal and a cup of tea – brewed fresh from leaves in a teapot – and, unable to persuade her restless visitor to lie down for a rest, supplied her with sandwiches for her journey or drove her to town.

Some of the neighbours were scandalised. When I, still a child, questioned why a drunk black woman should be taken in to our kitchen, my mother responded that no one could imagine what suffering she endured every day and anyway, it cost nothing to offer a little assistance to make an hour of it more endurable. And she followed up with straight advice about what she thought of people who differentiated between people on the basis of the colour of their skin.

It was worth taking note of lessons from my mother. Only this week, 50 years later, I discovered that the authorities of the time had stolen the woman's children from her when she was a young mother. She was trying to drown a lasting agony.

We seem, too often, to be surrounded by so much brutality that kindness feels like a quality abandoned to a past age. Assailed by headlines and images of almost incomprehensible general bastardry in our streets and abroad, it can be difficult to remind yourself that wickedness is nothing new and that there are such things as better angels.

The truth is more encouraging, as the swaggies of a Depression long ago knew and marked with chalk.

Even now the traveller is more likely than not to find generous hearts along the road.

Small things can remind you.

Last week, driving out across Victoria's western plains, I found myself in need of the simplest thing: a power outlet. My iPad was out of juice, the radio had just announced that Malcolm Fraser had expired and the editor needed a story filed.

The Lismore pub was up ahead. I wandered into the bar with iPad and power cord in hand, found the publican, who was busy down the back with the sort of tasks that occupy small businesspeople at opening time, and asked if I might sit at his bar, plug in to his wall socket and write my story. No worries, he said. He brewed me a cup of coffee and told me to stay as long as I wished.

A small enough thing, perhaps, from a fellow whose job is hospitality, but we've all struck malcontents who treat you as a nuisance and make it clear they'd rather you bought what you came for and then be on your way.

They depress the spirit and deserve a cross; this good bloke at the pub lifted a whole morning, and got a mental tick.

Few of us feel we can do much personally about changing the world.

And yet, we have the means and the hours to improve things around us, little bit by little bit, even if savagery lurks beyond our ken.

A decade or two ago a post-hippy slogan became so popular that just about every counter-culture store had a poster of it tacked up on the wall.

"Practise random kindness and senseless acts of beauty," declared the slogan, allegedly scrawled originally on a table mat in a restaurant north of (where else?) San Francisco in 1982.

We could do worse, even now, than chalk such a sentiment – too cute though it may seem – into our daily lives.