Ah, but the 'message' we picked up on was 'don't do it - it destroys fandom', which was probably a Chinese whispers version of 'the people who organised it were exhausted, and some who had been friends fell out with each other.' Just because it was a fannish maxim doesn't mean it was true!

I know there was a lot of resistance to bidding for Worldcon in Perth because the con-running fannish base was so small that we were concerned that it's kill Perth fandom for years.