He moved to California in 1976 and rarely returned to Australia thereafter. In America, he pursued interests in film, surf culture, and magazine publishing. He bought "Surfing Magazine" in 1976 and, during the mid-1980s, he expanded his interests by establishing the sister magazines, "Bodyboarding Magazine" and "Volleyball". In 1984, Packer released a book, "No Return Ticket", in which he interviewed nine fellow Australian expatriates: Robert Hughes, Gordon Chater, Graham Fraser, Dame Judith Anderson, James Wolfensohn, Germaine Greer, Maxwell Newton, Zoe Caldwell, and Sumner Locke Elliott. According to Mark Thomas of the "The Canberra Times", the book was a "quirky, frothy anachronism", in which the interviewees "whinge about the Australian cultural cringe in terms which no young Australian would find comprehensible".