On a spacious block in Darwin's rural area there's a congregation.

The descendants of a quiet and stoic patriarch sit under a tree, drizzling honey on warm damper and reminiscing on the good old days of old Darwin.

They're mourning.

Ray Petherick with a buffalo. ( Supplied )

"This here is damper … but when my mother made it you could smell it from a mile away and that's how they used to make bread," says a tall man.

"Open fire, coal, camp oven, and when they open the lid you can smell it."

This man, Tom Petherick, was the first-born son of Territory pioneer, crocodile hunter, scholar, botanist, anthropologist and author, Ray Petherick.

It's been a week since the man from Bendigo was buried like an Aboriginal man on his wife's traditional country in Litchfield National Park.

His story is one of a kind, of a person who gave up his own culture and took on another while living in the Northern Territory bush for decades, learning the lore of the land from clans who had occupied the area for thousands of years.

"He learned from the old Aborigines, traditional, tribal, bush Aborigines — my mother was one of them," said Mr Petherick.

"Not just a day trip or a weekend down there, [but] year after year after year out there."

Mr Petherick spent over 71 years sleeping under the Territory's stars, becoming a friend, family, and a voice for the traditional owners of 22 clans from Bynoe Harbour to Port Keats.

Ray Petherick, his wife Rosie, and their family in 2007. ( Supplied )

From PNG to Top End swamps

After serving with the Australian Army in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, Ray Petherick arrived in Darwin in 1948 with his business partner Fred Pocock and began cutting timber along Manton Dam.

Young Rosie Nangalaku and Ray Petherick when they first met in the late 1940s. ( Supplied )

It was hard and hot work in humid conditions, but the pair flourished in their new environment.

During this time, "fate dealt [Ray] a splendid hand", as he once said, and he met his wife Rose Nangalaku Petherick while cutting timber on paperbark country near the Reynolds and Finnis River in the Northern Territory.

Rose Nangalaku was a traditional Werrek/Djerait Goanna Clan woman.

The pair fell in love, logged, and lived on platforms built in paperbark trees among the swamps.

"It was remote, and you had to live there during the wet season, dry season," their son Tom said.

"Not only did they live there, they were out hunting crocodiles, sleeping in swags, going from lagoon to lagoon right down to the coast."

Rosie and Ray married in the Methodist church in Darwin and remained together for 58 years until she passed away in 2007, at the age of 82.

"The only argument they ever had was when my mother ran out of tobacco," said Tom.

In 1952, Rosie's stepdad Madjera and her brother Jimmy Numbutu walked from Daly River to take Rosie from Woolaning.

But after seeing his step daughter was well looked after and had two young children with Ray, Madjera told Rose she could stay.

Ray exchanged tobacco, and two bamboo spear shafts which he had under the roof in exchange for Rosie's hand in marriage.

Their marriage was sealed in this tribal exchange and it was Ray's first formal traditional acknowledgement and show of acceptance by Rosie's people.

The couple raised nine children, as well as extended family, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

They laid three of their children to rest.

The Petherick family lived for decades in a hand-built cabin on traditional land in Litchfield National Park, without power, water and cooking on a woodfire, damper included.

Close calls with crocodiles

In 1951, Mr Petherick and Mr Pocock started their second venture business — shooting crocodiles.

Rose Nangalaku Petherick helped her husband cure crocodile skins. ( Supplied )

The family would help cut and salt the skins along with the rest of the team, while the crocodile hunting business helped put the Petherick children through school, as it did for many of the NT's bush families.

Mr Petherick became a well-known hunter, aided by his intimate knowledge of the Top End's swamps to hunt the beasts, including infamous Territory icon 'Sweetheart'.

He was one of the few to develop a close rapport with the environment and was acknowledged as a "superb, sensitive naturalist and field expert of swamp living crocodiles, second to none", wrote author Col Stringer in his book The Saga of Sweetheart.

Ray Petherick holding his first born daughter, Margaret. ( Supplied )

One night, while hunting with Johnny Faulkner, Mr Petherick had a close call.

While creeping up to get a better shot at a 16-foot (4.8 metre) crocodile lying in the mud, the beast lunged out of a buffalo pad where buffaloes crossed a small creek, trying to knock Ray into the billabong.

Fortunately, there were too many palm trees and pandanus for the croc to get a good bite.

When he managed to get a shot at the crocodile, it writhed in pain and got tangled in the pandanus trees while trying to escape.

Mr Petherick took a second shot, the pandanus broke, and the croc slipped into the water.

While Mr Petherick maintained it was Sweetheart, it was only after that terror's capture and death in 1979 that his skeleton revealed that the encounter may have been one of the first recorded encounters of Sweetheart attacking people.

Ray Petherick was known as a "superb, sensitive naturalist and field expert of swamp living crocodiles, second to none". ( Supplied )

When Sweetheart was famously captured and stuffed, the skeleton revealed two possible bullet wounds: one was still lodged in the spine, possibly fired by Mr Petherick.

He went on to establish one of the Territory's first crocodile farms, incubating croc hatchlings.

Many people sought his advice on how to harvest from nests, and how to incubate and raise baby crocodiles from eggs.

Clans and land claims

Tom Petherick said his father's legacy needs to be remembered. ( ABC News: Dijana Damjanovic )

For the past 38 years, Mr Petherick's family said he travelled by car and foot (often with several family members and Aboriginal lawmen) across the escarpments, floodplains, and rainforests of Litchfield National Park, documenting the rock art sites and totemic rock formations, and linking them to their song lines and custodians.

He helped traditional owners, who spent their lives in the bush, to submit applications for native title in their areas pro bono.

The preservation and documentation of sacred sites became his lifetime's work.

"What people need to realise is the magnitude of the work that our grandfather has done," said his grandson Darren On.

"When people think of the greats in Aboriginal land rights, like Eddie Mabo, our Grandpa had done a massive area bigger than that, from Bynoe Harbour right down to Port Keats with more than 20 clans."

Ray Petherick is one of the very few non-Aboriginal people to be mourned with a traditional funeral. ( ABC News: Dijana Damjanovic )

The family say he stopped short of becoming an agitating activist, but simply wished to act as messenger for the Aboriginal clans he helped.

Darren On said his grandfather's advocacy on behalf of traditional owners was his lifetime's work. ( ABC News: Dijana Damjanovic )

"It's one of the biggest land rights [claims] and done by one man on his own, right off his own bat and in his own time," said Mr On.

"He never got any grants … he did it for the love of the people and he went through a lot of trouble and did a lot of research of his own, and didn't rely on government bodies; he did it himself."

Mr Petherick also worked with researchers from universities around Australia, including Sydney University and James Cook University.

"The knowledge he has is unreal; the knowledge that he's gathered, the fact that universities in Australia have asked him for advice and information says a lot of his experience," Mr On said.

Mr Petherick died in March at the age of 92 and was buried with a private tribal ceremony at Woolaning Springs, in Litchfield National Park, an honour rarely bestowed upon non-Aboriginal people.

Traditional owners farewell Ray Petherick with a private Aboriginal funeral in Litchfield National Park. ( ABC News: Dijana Damjanovic )

"The full tribal Aborigines, because he grew up with them, they put a ceremony on for him, that's how much they respected him," Tom said.

"We even put paperbark on the bottom of the coffin, lined it with his old axes and grabbing hooks and flowers on top, and they sang the private dreaming songs."

He said his father lived a healthy life, "he never smoked, he never played cards".

"I think it was walking through the bush for hours more so than anything that kept him alive for so long," Tom said.

"Because living in these areas, a healing process takes place; you feel lifting feelings and your age turns into youth."