After all, the institution its director, Dr Brendan Nelson, has referred to on more than occasion as "Australia's soul", has really hit its straps during this, the Gallipoli centenary year.

And, even more importantly, has it ever done more to indulge the fascination for tracked, armed and armoured vehicles that lurks inside many of us?

In recent months dedicated researchers and curators have added not one but three Axis tanks from World War One and World War Two to the public galleries.

The first, Mephisto, is a German relic of World War One. Normally housed in The Queensland Museum, the ultra-rare A7V Sturpanzerwagen is eight metres long, three metres tall and three metres wide.

This battlefield giant, which weighed in at 30 tonnes, was itself dwarfed by other "super weapons" the Germans had on the drawing board when peace broke out.

These included the K-Wagen, a land leviathan that weighed 150 tonnes, could sprint along at 7.5km/h and was 13 metres long.

It remained the heaviest tank ever conceived until, in 1943, Hitler commissioned Porsche to build the inappropriately named "Maus" [or Mouse] super heavy tank.

A supersized and updated version of the K-Wagen concept, the Maus had 20cm thick armour, could have been fitted with a 170mm gun and weighed 188 tonnes. Only a couple were ever finished.

On the plus side it was a little shorter than K-Wagen, making it more car park friendly.

All of these easily dwarf the two latest additions to the memorial's exhibition space; the Japanese Ha-go Type 95 tank that went on display on August 15 and the Italian Carro Veloce 33 Tankette which went on display on Tuesday.

The Ha-Go was, according to my trusty field guide, "a poor design but better than most other Japanese tanks".

Roughly the length of a Honda Accord or a Camry, the Ha-Go weighed twice as much as the Italian built "tankette" now guarding the rear entrance to Lieutenant-General Leslie Morsehead's spartan caravan parked in the lee of G-for-George.

The CV33 is a loaner from the Canadian War Museum which has been displaying our Menin Gate Lions since late last year. It was back loaded to Australia aboard the RAAF plane that carried the lions.

The "tankette" was captured by either English or Australian troops, nobody knows for sure, in the early 1940s and shipped back to Britain for analysis.

It was then given to the Canadians who have lent it to us in exchange for an M3 Stuart, one of the American light tanks shipped across the Atlantic to Britain by the gross in the early 1940s under the lend-lease arrangement.

The CV33 is one of the smaller tracked vehicles ever used in combat, weighing from 3.2 to 3.4 tonnes depending on the variant and coming it at just three metres long or about the same a Daihatsu Charade.

Garth O'Connell, the AWM's assistant curator, is hopeful its size will make it appeal to children, prompting a new generation to take an interest in the valour and sacrifice Australians have demonstrated over the past 100 years.