The family of cricketer Phil Hughes has invited the whole town of Macksville to the batsman's funeral.
Everywhere in Macksville, you'll see scenes like this Source: NewsComAu
THE town of Macksville is almost exactly halfway up the highway from Sydney to Brisbane.
That's more than a little ironic, because Macksville's most famous export Phillip Hughes was himself halfway to Brisbane last week, albeit in a different sense.
The 25-year-old was batting at the Sydney Cricket Ground for a place in the Australian team in the first Test team in Brisbane.
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His now famous score of 63 not out was probably enough to get him there, before that rising ball, bowled by the wholly innocent Sean Abbott, delivered its awful fate.
Half an ounce of luck and it could all have been so different. Half a cricket ball stitch between a mere bruise and utter tragedy.
Now flags in Macksville fly at half mast, as they have at the SCG all week.
In shopfronts like Megasave Discounts and on street corners throughout Macksville, spontaneous floral and pictorial tributes honour a life. A life half lived in terms of longevity but lived 100 times over in terms of experience, achievements and adventures.
A tribute outside the Macksville ex-servicemen's club Source: NewsComAu
Other locals are a little more guarded. They're turn their backs on unfamiliar visitors, half flattered that people care, but preferring to deal privately with their pain.
Funerals are always two-tone events. We grieve for a life lost, but celebrate it too, and all the other lives it touched. It's a little glass half empty but also, to an extent, glass half full.
Local Shelley Schembri, who is roughly Phillip Hughes's age and who like everyone in town knows the Hughes family, agrees that the funeral will be as much about celebrating Phillip Hughes as mourning his passing.
"Oh absolutely, I think you have to take it like that," she says. It will be sad, so sad for those left behind, but he went out doing what he loved to do and he was really good at it.
"It's a close-knit community. Everyone knows everyone in the town, there's probably not a person in town who hasn't bought a raffle ticket from his mum Virginia. She worked so hard to get Phil where he was. His dad Greg did too.
"Everyone's just so proud of his natural talent and his determination. We're just really proud of where he got to and who he was."
Phillip Hughes was dropped several times from the Australian team, but to locals in a Macksville, he was always number one Source: NewsComAu
The two pubs in this town of 2500 are quiet the night before today's expected influx of 5000 mourners. The Nambucca Hotel, Hughes's favourite watering hole which locals call "Bonzer's", closes early. So does the ex-servicemen's club.
The Star Hotel, the grand restored timber pub on the Nambucca River, stays open serving enormous chicken parmies and racks of ribs the size of half a cow.
The Star has a few raucous drinkers who seem oblivious to the sombre mood, but they're mostly road crew working on the new bypass.
This Macksville shopfront illustrates how Phillip Hughes loved cricket and cattle, and possibly not in that order! Source: NewsComAu
Macksville, which is half pretty and half plain, is one of the few remaining north coast towns which is still bisected by the Pacific Highway. In years to come, the highway will bypass it, just as in days and weeks to come, the focus of the nation will turn away from this town and its most famous son.
But Phillip Hughes will never be forgotten and will always be cherished for the person, friend, family man and cricketer that he was. That's something you can be 100 per cent sure of, without so much as half a doubt.
Everywhere in Macksville, you'll see scenes like this Source: NewsComAu
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