‘We think about you every day’: Hughes family’s heartfelt tribute to Phillip

“Phillip, we love you, we miss you and we are forever proud of you. We think about you every day and we are so thankful you were ours. Thank you for being the most extraordinary son and loving brother.”

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The mere fact the documentary has been made by Cricket Australia in collaboration with the Hughes family, whose members all sat for interviews recently, speaks volumes for the healing that is intertwined with the storytelling.

“We feel Phillip all around us. Every paddock and every inch of this farm he has been around, and this place was paradise to him,” Megan Hughes says in the documentary.

Going back 10 years to the SCG, St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst and the funeral in Macksville, or eight years to the very public coronial inquest held in Sydney, there were deep chasms opened up between the Hughes family and cricket.

They started amid the enormous shock and grief of what happened on the pitch on the afternoon of November 25, with the realisation by that evening that Phillip, who had been struck on the neck by a short ball in a Sheffield Shield game, was not going to survive.

Private negotiations between the family’s representative and CA about arrangements, both for the funeral and the looming Test series between Australia and India that summer, were heated and painful.

While the outcomes – a public farewell for Phillip seen by millions around the world and a Test match honouring him in Adelaide – were both fitting events, the road there was difficult, causing fractures that took years to mend. The sense of a cricket system protecting itself, and its commercially rich alliance with India, was hard for the Hughes family to shake.

That impression was only heightened in October 2016, over three days at the inquest. Greg, Virginia, Megan and Jason did not go into that difficult process expecting to see major changes to cricket’s laws, nor a public inquisition into the way the game is played. But they did expect that cricket would be held to account.

Instead, they were left feeling as though cricket was, again, covering itself rather than opening up in a moment of grief that, for them, would never truly pass.

Harsh words were exchanged in the inquest room and outside it, and ultimately Greg and Virginia walked out during the Cricket Australia counsel’s final remarks. It looked very much as though the break between the Hughes family and cricket would be permanent.

After his witness testimony, the broken, crumpled state of Tom Cooper, the South Australian batter who had been Phillip’s partner at the crease for his final innings and also his housemate at the time, summed up the cost.

As is typical for many rural communities, the Hughes family of Macksville, south of Coffs Harbour, could be slow to trust, only opening up to visitors after numerous meetings convinced them that a genuine connection existed. In the years after 2014, they often felt a sense of absence: so many cricket figures who had expressed lavish sentiments in public for Phillip, or for them, had gone to ground.

Their one tenuous link to the game was provided by James Henderson, Phillip’s manager and the family spokesperson. And cricket, it must be said, did not seem like it should be much of a priority relative to several private hardships suffered by the family in the intervening years.

But as the 10th anniversary neared, there was a mood to capture something of Phillip’s life for posterity. An official biography, co-written by Malcolm Knox and Peter Lalor and published in 2015, had provided one such document, but there was so much more to tell and reflect on.

Undeniably, the concept of a documentary chimed with most people’s memories of Phillip, a whirl of energy, humour and cheek whether he was batting or socialising. The moving image captured so much more than the stationary one.

There was, of course, trepidation within the family about opening up once more and about reconnecting with cricket authorities who, in the years after 2014, had gone through episodes such as the Newlands scandal of 2018 and the COVID-19 pandemic that reshaped much about CA’s manner of doing things.

It was Nick Hockley, the CA chief executive now seeing out his final summer in charge, who genuinely opened the door for a rapprochement by championing the concept of a family-driven documentary project without hesitation or prevarication.

Hockley’s desire to mend bridges across the cricket community has always been a big part of his commission. This was the kind of leadership the Hughes family needed to be able to connect with after so many years of mistrust.

An important decision to help rebuild that trust was an agreement that the project would focus overwhelmingly on the life that Phillip packed into his 25 years. As Greg Hughes says: “He could associate and start talking with anybody, you know what I mean. Yeah, that touches me a bit, that.”

It is that spirit, and Phillip’s legendary batting talent, that the family wished to capture, rather than the traumas of his death that had already been exhaustively and definitively documented by the 2016 inquest. Those findings, by the way, are publicly available to all who wish to relive the awful details of 2014, and have been so for years.

Once the production was under way, with CA’s digital department keeping light on its feet to work around the family’s wishes, the other major question surrounded a list of interview contributors for the project.

It was up to the family to decide who would speak about Phillip, a more vexing consideration than most given the aforementioned history. Some figures, such as his Test captains Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke, Australia’s then batting coach Justin Langer and teammates Usman Khawaja, Aaron Finch and Ed Cowan, were straightforward choices.

Cooper, however, had carried both the grief of Phillip’s death and the pain of the inquest through a long cricket career. To be told that the family wanted him to speak was an enormous weight lifted from sagging shoulders.

Last week, the Hughes family sat down and watched a cut of the documentary for the first time. They now have a piece of work that will sit in the archives, not only distilling how much the cricket world loved Phillip, but also how his father, mother, brother and sister really felt about him.

“The Boy from Macksville documentary is a very special collection of vision, interviews and heart-felt memories of Phillip,” Henderson told this masthead. “It’s a profound piece of work that will ensure Phillip’s star will continue to burn brightly for many, many decades to come.

“The Hughes family is so grateful for Cricket Australia delivering on all their wishes.”

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After so many years of pain and sadness, 2024 has seen some much overdue healing between the family who Phillip always kept close, and the game that allowed his infectious personality to be shared by so many beyond his Macksville home.

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