Ms. Browning was acquitted of four charges of being knowingly concerned with the fire-bombing or attempted fire-bombing of cars belonging to US or South African diplomats. She was found guilty of threatening the then US Ambassador, William Lane, in 1988.
It was made by Mandy King who made the much acclaimed Shadow Over East Timor. This one does not deserve the same acclaim.
Its conclusions arise out of juxtaposition and assertion rather than evidence.
At one stage Ms Browning says that the Australian Federal Police got a search warrant to search her house, and said plaintively: they came in whether you liked it or not. Well, I would have thought that was the very idea of a search warrant.
The documentary does tell us of the thoroughness of the police. They bugged her house, followed her and searched her home and work premises and got enough evidence to convince a magistrate to commit her for trial, but not enough to convince a jury that she was guilty beyond reasonable doubt. She is rightly to be considered innocent of those charges.
But this documentary draws a mighty long bow from that. It asserts the fire-bombings were a put-up job to discredit the anti-apartheid movement. But I don’t think it would provide enough evidence to convince a magistrate of a prima facie case.
Most of the material comes from re-enactments of court transcripts and interviews with Ms Browning, her friends and her husband, Pan African Congress representative Maxwell Nemadzivhanani.
There was no direct evidence, apart from that, of a police conspiracy to frame Ms Browning, or even that they acted as part of a international intelligence link-up to give succour to the South Africa regime.
About the best they came up with was the disparity of effort in police investigation of the diplomatic fire-bombings and fires at the South African Liberation Centre and the BLF.
No, this documentary does not disturb me. It comforts me that the police are capable of such thorough investigation. And if anyone has discredited the worthy cause of opposing apartheid in this episode it is Kerry Anne Browning for being so stupid as to send a threatening note to the US Ambassador.
Ms King no doubt had matter of substance to investigate in her Timor documentary. Here, it seems she started on a project and having invested so much in it, plugged away to production instead of abandoning it when it was leading nowhere.
It provides precious little more than has already come out in the court proceedings, though it opens with a splendid shot of Canberra and has some cute Hitchcockesque music that sounded like the opening bars of Cilla Black’s üYou’re My World.