Macksville is a town in mourning.

The small agricultural centre with a population of 2,567 is a quiet place at the best of times. But when news of local boy Hughes’s passing was confirmed in the mid afternoon, the streets were empty like it was the middle of the night.

“When the news came through, the town was basically like a ghost town. There wasn’t a person to be seen,” says Karl Spear, bar manager at the Nambucca Hotel.

Every single person in Macksville was watching a TV somewhere, glued to the sombre press conference at which Michael Clarke bravely delivered a brief statement on behalf of the Hughes family before hastily retreating from the glare of the cameras.

The Nambucca Hotel is normally lucky to have half a dozen people inside in the hour or so before knock-off time. Yesterday, there were 40, 50, 60, and still they kept coming.

This is the hotel were Phillip Hughes used to have a quiet drink or two on his trips home. The town has two pubs. The other one, the Star Hotel on the Nambucca river, is a little flasher, a little brighter. But the Nambucca Hotel, on the main road through town, is far more homely.

Locals call it “Bonzer’s”, and it’s the sort of place where close mates and honest country folk meet. The sort of people Phillip Hughes never stopped calling his best mates no matter how high his star rose.

Hughes called everyone in town a friend, young or old, black or white. Everyone knew him and everyone had a good word for him.

Back in 2009, when the then 20-year-old first returned home after a stunning debut tour of South Africa in which he scored two Test centuries, they put on a welcome for home at the local footy oval.

He rode around the oval in a big green ute while the crowd chanted “boof, boof, boof” — a reference to his old baby name when he was a chunky little thing.

Afterwards, he mingled with the locals. He had a beer with old mates from school and the cricket team, but it wasn’t just about the boys. He was generous with his time with anyone who wanted a slice of him.

Macksville matriarch Shirley Freeman was working as a gate attendant at the football ground that day, as she has for too many years to count. She had a good old whinge to Phillip about the god-awful hours he’d forced her to keep because of the time difference in South Africa.

“I had to have nanna naps in the daytime so I could sit up all night watching you,” she joked. Hughes replied, with that trademark cheeky grin and glint in his eye, that he was very sorry he had inconvenienced her.

Mrs Freeman’s grandsons Luke and Mitchell had played with Hughes in junior cricket teams. Not that they could come close to matching him.

“He was a cut above, he played rings around my grandsons,” she recalls.

When they weren’t playing cricket with Phillip, the trio would disappear into one or another’s bedrooms and play music which Mrs Freeman describes as “far too loud”.

After school, Luke grew up to be a butcher and Mitchell a school teacher. Phillip Hughes followed a similar path. He butchered opposition attacks and taught bowlers a lesson or two.

These days, there is a new crop of rebellious young boys roaming the streets near Mrs Freeman’s house. But there wasn’t yesterday.

“There was none of that this afternoon,” Mrs Freeman reflects with a sigh. “I think the whole town was in shock.

“We’re all thinking about Phillip’s mum Virginia and how she’d be going. She’s such an outgoing sort of person.”

The Hughes family has a banana plantation just out of town but Phillip’s parents Greg and Virginia live in a modest brick home on the eastern edge of town, backing onto the cricket oval.

The backyard had a chook pen on the leg side, which goes a long way to explaining why Phillip Hughes was so strong on the off-side.

Quite simply, he didn’t want to hurt the chooks. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. Ever.

As a nation grieves the loss of one its favourite sporting sons, no one is doing it tougher than the people of Macksville.

“I don’t know how we recover, I just don’t know,” Mrs Freeman says.

“We’ve all been waiting for him to get back into the Australian team and we thought on Tuesday that he’d done enough to get back in.” (Hughes was 63 not out when struck.)

“I think it’ll take a while for people to get over the shock of what happened. We all loved him. He’s such a nice, young kid.”

Back at the Nambucca Hotel, bar manager Karl Spear says he doesn’t know what happens next. Like everyone, he is awaiting news of a funeral. He doesn’t even know if it’ll happen in town, although the Hughes family has now suggested it likely will be.

“We hope it would be,” he says. “Possibly they could hold it at the cricket oval. There’s nowhere else you could fit all the people anyway.”

A small group of locals headed yesterday to the oval for an impromptu memorial service. Where else?

Whenever and wherever the funeral happens, you can bet that the streets of Macksville will be ghostly again. Even Bonzer’s will be empty. For a few hours anyway.

“I’ve spoken to our staff would and every one of them wants to go. We’ll have to close the hotel so we can all go. There won’t be a person in town who’s not there.”

And afterwards, there probably won’t be a person who’s not at Bonzer’s. Well, except one. One incredibly special person will be missing.

Former Australian cricketer Greg Matthews said yesterday that the cricket fraternity had lost a “brother”.

So have 2,567 people in Macksville. Each and every one of them.

(news.com.au)