Well hello, I'm James Holland and welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk.

I haven't got out with me at the moment but I have got Dr Peter Johnson from the National

Army Museum and Peter is kind of rather nice because everyone else is gone.

We've got the place to ourselves, it's nice and quiet, they've actually got rid of the

shelling and the machine gunning so we're going to be safe as well.

I'm looking at this extraordinary collection of mostly small arms suspended by wires

altogether.

It's like a sort of piece of modern art all in itself but some incredible weapons here

and lots that I recognise but lots that I don't.

Little sort of weird hybrids.

So I'm looking at sort of various machine guns, sub machine guns, rifles, pistols.

Right in front of me here is a stand gun but there's a couple of other sort of stand

gun looking things which aren't quite stand guns but might be.

Yeah but tell me all.

Sure, so I've never seen them before.

So this one right in front of you here, this is the Owen which is an Australian.

Is this the one with the two grips?

This is the one with the two grips and can you see it's painted in the jungle camouflage.

Now when the war began, when the second war began, Australia didn't have any kind of indigenous

weapons manufacturer that had just used British weapons.

And so obviously with the Japanese advance who the Pacific they needed to accelerate this.

They had some in development but they weren't particularly good.

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