Hiking packing list Australia: build it once, reuse forever

It's 11pm the night before Day 1 of the Overland Track. Your gear is spread across the lounge floor. You can't find the spare gas canister you swore you bought, the head torch is somewhere in a drawer of cables, and you're trying to remember whether you packed the puffy jacket last time at Kosciuszko or if it's still in the car. You open Notes, find a packing list from 2022, and start crossing things off, again.

If that sounds familiar, the fix isn't a better PDF checklist. It's treating your gear as a library you maintain, not a list you rebuild every trip. This guide walks through a framework for a hiking packing list in Australia, multi-day walks like the Overland Track, Larapinta, K'gari, Cape to Cape, Jatbula, plus a free tool built for exactly this job.

Heads-up: This article includes partner links to MyPacks, a gear-management app built for hikers.

Start with weight, not items#

Most packing lists start with "what do I need?" That's the wrong first question. Start with "how much weight do I want on my back?" Then work backwards.

Two numbers matter:

• Total pack weight, everything on your back, including food, fuel and water.
• Base weight, your pack with everything except food, fuel and water (the consumables that change every trip).

Base weight is the honest measure of your kit. Food adds about 600–650g per person per day. Water is 1kg per litre. A 6-day Tassie walk in autumn? Roughly 4kg of food and 1–2kg of water on top of your base, depending on creek access.

Rough base-weight bands most Aussie hikers fall into:

• Traditional: 10–12kg base. Comfortable, plenty of margin.
• Lightweight: under 9kg base. Most weekend warriors who've done a few trips.
• Ultralight: under 4.5kg base. Deliberate gear choices, every gram weighed.

A typical Overland Track total pack weight sits around 15–20kg loaded. Get your base under 9kg and the loaded weight stops being miserable. The only way to know your base weight is to weigh things, kitchen scales work fine.

Break your list into categories that survive multiple trips#

A list of 60 random items is a nightmare to maintain. Categories make it scannable and reusable.

The seven categories that cover almost every multi-day walk in Australia:

1. The Big Three: pack, shelter, sleep system. Usually 50–60% of your base weight.
2. Cooking system. Stove, pot, fuel canister, lighter, spork, mug.
3. Clothing, worn vs carried. What you start the day in vs what's in the pack.
4. Safety and navigation. PLB, first aid, map, compass, head torch, spare batteries.
5. Water and food. Bottles, filter or tablets, day-by-day food bag.
6. Personal admin. Toothbrush, sunscreen, toilet trowel, dry bags.
7. The "small stuff" pile. Repair tape, spare cord, phone cable, sunglasses, the stuff that creeps in.

Worn items don't count toward base weight. That's not a cheat, it's the convention everyone uses. Trekking poles, sun hat, boots, the clothes you started in: all worn, all separate.

The trap of starting from scratch every trip#

Here's where most hikers lose hours and add accidental kilos. Every trip is a little different, different season, different length, different group, different track. So most people open a fresh doc, copy a bit from last time, add a bit, forget a bit, and end up with three slightly different lists across three apps.

The result:

• You forget the small stuff (head torch, spare laces, tent peg) until you're in the car park.
• You over-pack "just in case" because you can't remember what you actually used last trip.
• Your real pack weight slowly creeps up trip after trip, and you blame your knees.
• Half your gear is in the cupboard, half is in the camping tub, and you never have an honest inventory.

The Notes-app system works for one weekend trip. It falls apart by the third walk of the year.

Use a gear library, not a packing list#

The shift that changes everything: stop maintaining packing lists. Maintain a gear library instead.

A gear library is the inventory of every piece of hiking kit you own, with weights. A packing list is just a selection from that library for one specific trip. Once the library exists, every new trip is 15 minutes of ticking boxes, not two hours of remembering.

This is exactly what MyPacks is built for. It's a free web app for hikers that gives you:

• A persistent gear library. Add your tent, your puffy, your gas canister once. Reuse on every list.
• Live weight tracking. Grams, kilos, ounces, pick your unit. Base weight calculated automatically.
• Trip-based packing lists. Build a list for the Overland Track, another for a Kosciuszko overnighter, another for Cape to Cape, all pulling from the same library.
• Mobile-first. Works properly on a phone, unlike the older tools (LighterPack is web-only).
• LighterPack import. If you already have a list there, you don't have to retype anything.
• Photos and notes per item. "This stove leaks if you over-tighten the canister", the kind of note future-you will thank past-you for.

The free tier (50 items, 1 packing list) is enough for a weekend walker. Premium is US$5.99/month for unlimited lists, exports, and public sharing, useful if you do four or five different style trips a year. There's a comparison of MyPacks vs LighterPack vs PackWizard vs Hikt on their own blog if you want to see how the apps stack up.

Tools like this are not new for thru-hikers in the US; they're badly under-used in Australia, where most of us are still on PDFs.

Worked example: Overland Track packing list (6 days, autumn)#

Here's what a realistic library-driven list looks like for one Aussie classic. Weights are typical, not minimum.

The Big Three (~3.8kg)

• 60L pack, 1,500g
• 2-person tent (shared), 1,100g (550g per person)
• Sleeping bag, 3-season rated to -2°C, 950g
• Sleeping mat, inflatable, 450g
• Inflatable pillow, 80g

Cooking system (~450g)

• Canister stove, 80g
• 750ml pot, 130g
• 230g gas canister, 360g (counts as consumable, not base weight)
• Spork, 20g
• Lighter + backup matches, 25g
• Mug, 50g

Clothing, carried (~1.2kg)

• Puffy jacket, 350g
• Rain shell, 280g
• Rain pants (real ones, not a poncho), 220g
• Spare base layer top, 180g
• Spare socks (×2), 100g
• Beanie + buff, 70g
• Thermal long johns for hut/sleep, 200g

Safety & navigation (~600g)

• PLB, 150g (non-negotiable for the Overland)
• First aid kit (personalised, not a pre-pack), 220g
• Map + compass, 80g
• Head torch + spare batteries, 90g
• Whistle, 10g
• Repair tape, spare cord, multi-tool, 100g

Water (~250g empty)

• 2L hydration bladder + 1L bottle, 250g
• Water tablets, 15g

Food (carried, not base)

• 6 days × 600g = 3.6kg

Personal admin (~300g)

• Toothbrush + paste, sunscreen, lip balm, toilet paper, trowel, hand sanitiser, dry bags

Total base weight: ~6.6kg Total pack weight loaded (base + 3.6kg food + 360g fuel + 2L water): ~12.5kg

That's a lightweight Overland setup. Add 2–3kg if you're carrying a heavier tent, a cosier sleeping bag, or comfort items. The point isn't the exact number; it's that you can see the number, change one item, and watch the total update. That feedback loop is what shifts your packing.

A few Aussie-specific gotchas to bake into your library notes:

• Gaiters for snake country and scrubby tracks (Larapinta, Jatbula, Cape to Cape).
• 3-season bag is the floor for autumn/winter Tasmania and the Alps. Summer-rated bags will leave you cold.
• Gas canister rules, many hut systems and ferries restrict canister carriage. Check before flying.
• Sun protection is part of safety here, not personal admin. Long-sleeve sun shirt, broad hat, SPF 50+.

The trip-end habit that compounds over years#

This is the bit nobody tells you. The morning after you get home, before the gear goes back in the cupboard, do three things:

1. Update weights, anything you weighed properly for the first time on this trip.
2. Note what you wished you had, gloves, a second buff, more snacks for Day 4.
3. Note what you carried for no reason, that second book, the third pair of socks, the heavy multi-tool.

Five minutes. Then it's saved in your library forever.

Across 5–10 trips, your list stops being a generic checklist and becomes a personalised system that knows you. You'll start choosing gear by what your library tells you, not what the gear-store ad tells you. That's the real win. Not the app itself, but the habit the app makes easy.

What to do before your next multi-day walk#

The order of operations:

1. Sort the campground at the trailhead. Most multi-day walks in Australia start or end at a road-accessible campground: Cradle Mountain, Ormiston Gorge, Kingfisher Bay. If your trailhead campground is one of the popular ones and it's booked out, you can set a free CampWatch alert and get a text the moment a cancellation opens up.
2. Build your gear library in MyPacks. Free, no card. An hour of weighing and entering, once.
3. Build the trip list. Tick items from the library, see your base weight live, swap heavier items if needed.
4. Dry-pack the weekend before. Load everything into your pack, walk around the block. You'll catch the things the spreadsheet missed.

Build it once, reuse forever#

The best hiking packing list in Australia isn't a perfect PDF. It's the one you actually update after every trip, that knows your gear, your weights, your trade-offs, and gets faster every walk.

Spend an hour now building the library, and the next five years of walks get easier. Start a free MyPacks library, weigh your gear, and never start from scratch again.

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Links to mypacks.co in this article are partner links. MyPacks is a gear-management app we're happy to point hikers toward because it tackles a real problem most of us have lived with.