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Digging through The New York Times’s archives to learn more about Guadalcanal for a story on the Solomon Islands, I started to notice an interesting dateline that kept coming up: “Somewhere in Australia.”

When I searched for the phrase in our TimesMachine archive, it turned up 235 results.

A few of the stories just happened to have that line in the text, but mostly it was a dateline on stories from Australia during World War II.

“Somewhere in Australia” essentially meant “somewhere with the United States military in Australia, but we can’t say where for security reasons.”