Waltzing Matilda played and more than 100 French villagers applauded as Tony Abbott arrived in Villers-Bretonneux on his tour of the Western Front overnight.

The Prime Minister's first visit to the area came after he joined world leaders at D-Day 70th anniversary ceremonies in Normandy on Friday.

Mr Abbott says Australia's focus during the centenary of World War I should be just as much on the "devastating victory" in northern France, as the "glorious defeat" at Gallipoli that led to the Anzac legend.

"It's the only time Australia's forces have been in the main battles of the main war theatre and made a major difference to its outcome," he said.

"Our duty to the dead is to remember what they achieved."

Most prime ministers pick an area of war history they focus more heavily on. Mr Abbott wants to shift Australia's psyche.

"Australians should be as familiar with the story of the western front as we are with Gallipoli," he said.

"Australians should congregate here, every April 25th, no less than Anzac Cove."

Interactive museum to tell wartime story

The Abbott Government plans to build an interactive museum near the Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux to help tell the wartime story properly.

It will modelled on similar British facilities nearby and form the centrepiece of a tourist trail through significant Australian sites on the Somme.

It will open on Anzac Day 2018 and take the name of World War I General Sir John Monash.

"[He] brought organisation and technology to the battlefield to break the stalemate of trench warfare," Mr Abbott said.

"Australians should be at least as familiar with the achievements of Monash as we are with the heroism of John Simpson Kirkpatrick".

French fields 'sown with Australian sacrifice'

A total of 1,200 diggers died retaking Villers-Bretonneux on Anzac Day in 1918, and overnight Mr Abbott was given a very warm welcome on an otherwise wet, windy day.

About a quarter of the village turned out to hear him speak.

"The people here will never forget the courage... and sacrifice of so many young Australians," local mayor Patrick Simon said.

The local school was built with money raised by Victorian schoolchildren in the 1920s.

Tony Abbott lays a wreath at the Australian National War Memorial in Villers-Bretonneaux, France. ( ABC: James Glenday )

Many were relatives of the 46,000 Australian troops killed on the front during the war.

"No place on Earth has been more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than these fields in France," Mr Abbott said.

"Australia helped to shape world history as never before or since".

Mr Abbott also visited other Australian and British memorials in the Somme overnight with the incoming Defence chief Mark Binskin.

Commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings during World War II attracted leaders from across the world, and Mr Abbott got the opportunity to get to know a few of them better.

He lunched with the likes of US president Barack Obama, Russian president Vladimir Putin and British prime minister David Cameron.

A bilateral meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel was cancelled, but he is later scheduled to hold talks with French president Francois Hollande in Paris.

Mr Abbott heads to North America today for the next leg of his trip.