By Chris Jones

IT is nearly 60 years since Carmel Emmi, right, became the only person injured by an enemy air attack on Australia's east coast during World War II.

But she still bears the scars of that cold evening in July 1942 when, as a toddler on her parents' farm, she was hit by shrapnel from a bomb dropped by a Japanese long-range flying boat.

"I still get headaches and I still have this scar on my scalp where the shrapnel hit me," Ms Emmi, now 62, says. "But it was the war and I guess we sort of expected these things to happen."

Ms Emmi, then 2-year-old Carmel Zullo, was asleep in her cot at her parents' cane farm at Saltwater, 13km north of Mossman, when the Japanese plane flew over and jettisoned eight bombs.

Seven exploded harmlessly in the canefields but one fell close to the farmhouse. Shrapnel penetrated the corrugated iron walls of the house and a fragment seared across Carmel's skull.

"(My mother) said the blast woke her and she saw I was covered in blood," Ms Emmi recalls. "She thought I had been killed and started screaming."

Fortunately, the piece of shrapnel had only sliced through Carmel's scalp. Her parents raced her to Mossman Hospital and she spent three months there, a stay complicated by her contracting measles while still seriously ill.