11th February 2026

The Strangest Yoga Studio in Perth Is 122 Years Old, Underground, and Used to Be a Nightclub

Why a limestone cave that once hosted Perth’s most glamorous dinner parties might be the most effective wellness venue in Western Australia.

In the 1930s, if you were wealthy, well-connected, and looking for a night out in Perth, there was a place you could go that nobody talked about in polite company during daylight hours. Not because anything scandalous was happening, but because the exclusivity was rather the point. You would drive an hour north of the city, enter Yanchep National Park on Whadjuk and Yued Country, descend into a limestone cave, and spend the evening eating, drinking, and dancing underground while the bush carried on without you above.

They called it the Silver Stocking Cabaret Cave. The Duke of Gloucester opened it officially in 1934. It had, at that point, already been known as Milligan’s Cave and then Ballroom Cave, because apparently the naming conventions of the 1930s were as fluid as the cocktail menu. Young women made their debuts into society down there, emerging from the limestone like debutantes from some antipodean underworld.

Nearly a century later, we use this same cave for yoga.

And the thing that fascinates me about this particular act of historical repurposing is how perfectly it works, despite the fact that almost nothing about the original use case and the current one seems to have anything in common. The 1930s socialites were there for spectacle, performance, and being seen. We bring people there to slow down, close their eyes, and stop performing entirely. Same cave, opposite intentions, and yet the place delivers on both counts, which tells you something important about the power of an environment to amplify whatever you bring into it.

The Walk That Isn’t the Warm-Up

Most people assume the hike is the prelude and the cave is the main event. They arrive at Yanchep expecting to tick off the walk so they can get to the interesting bit underground. And they’re wrong, but not in the way they think, because the hike isn’t a warm-up. The hike is the mechanism that makes everything in the cave actually land.

The route takes you 3.5 kilometres through the Jarrah and Tuart woodlands of Boomerang Gorge, past Loch McNess, and through a landscape that holds over 570 cave systems beneath its surface. Yanchep National Park sits on Whadjuk and Yued Country and has been a significant hunting ground and gathering place for thousands of years. The name itself comes from Yandjip or Yanget, the Noongar word for the bulrush reed that fringes the lakes. There is a particular quality to walking through country that has been known and cared for over that timescale. You can’t quite name it, but you can feel it, and it has nothing to do with the brochure.

Along the way, kangaroos graze on the oval with the particular brand of indifference that only an animal entirely unbothered by your existence can muster. The Koala Boardwalk introduces you to a resident colony doing what koalas do best, which is absolutely nothing, with extraordinary commitment. There is something deeply reassuring about watching an animal that has evolved to sleep twenty hours a day and appears entirely unapologetic about it. In a culture that celebrates relentless productivity, the koala is a furry counterargument.

But the real work of the hike is quieter than the wildlife spotting. Somewhere between the car park and Boomerang Gorge, a negotiation takes place inside your nervous system that you won’t notice until it’s already finished. The ambient processing that was running in the background when you arrived, the mental tab-switching, the residue of whatever you were thinking about on the drive, the low-grade alertness that comes from existing in a built environment, all of it starts to wind down. Your breath drops lower in your body. Your attention widens. You stop rehearsing what you’ll say next and start actually noticing where you are.

By the time you reach the cold-pressed juice at the transition point, something has already shifted. You’re not the same person who got out of the car an hour ago. You’re slower, more open, more available. Which is exactly the state you need to be in for what comes next.

Why a Cave Works Better Than a Studio

There is a reasonable argument to be made that yoga in a cave is a gimmick. A novelty. Something you do once for the Instagram story and then file under “quirky things I’ve done.” I would have made this argument myself a few years ago, and I would have been comprehensively wrong.

Here is what actually happens when you practise yoga underground in a limestone cave that has been quietly air-conditioning itself to the same temperature for thousands of years, after your nervous system has already been unwound by an hour of walking through the bush: the usual negotiations your body runs in every built environment, the ones that process ambient noise, temperature fluctuations, visual stimulation, and the low-grade vigilance of modern life, don’t just quieten down. They stop. Not because you’ve willed them to stop, or because someone has told you to breathe more deeply, but because between the hike and the cave, there is simply nothing left for them to respond to.

The acoustics alone are worth the drive. Cabaret Cave is, by any measure, acoustically extraordinary. Sound behaves differently underground, in the same way that light behaves differently underwater. Everything becomes rounder, more enveloping, more present. A guided meditation that would feel adequate in a studio becomes something genuinely immersive inside the cave, not because the words are different but because the place in which they land has changed. The container shapes the experience. This is true of caves, it is true of meeting rooms, it is true of every place you have ever tried to think clearly in, and it is one of the things we consistently underestimate when we design our lives around content rather than context.

The session itself is forty-five minutes and entirely beginner-friendly, which I mention because the word “yoga” still carries a certain amount of social baggage. People worry they’ll be the only one who can’t touch their toes, or that they’ll need to own specialist clothing, or that everyone else will know what they’re doing. Everyone worries about this. Nobody needs to. If you can lie on the ground and breathe, you have all the prerequisites sorted.

The Sequencing Is the Design

If I were being reductive about Zen In The Cave, I would describe it as a hike followed by yoga. In the same way that you might describe a great meal as “protein and vegetables” or describe falling in love as “two people who spend time together.” Technically accurate, but missing the entire mechanism.

The reason this experience works the way it does is the sequencing. The hike through the bush strips away the ambient noise of your domestic state. The walking rhythm regulates your nervous system. The wildlife, the trees, the country itself begins to open up your attention. Then the cold-pressed juice creates a pause, a threshold moment between moving and stillness. And then you descend into the cave, and the yoga catches you in this newly open state, where your body and mind are actually available to receive what the practice has to offer, rather than spending the first thirty minutes trying to arrive.

This is the problem with most yoga classes, incidentally. You rush from your car, roll out your mat, and spend half the session just trying to stop thinking about whatever you were thinking about in the car park. The teacher says “let go” and your nervous system says “of what, specifically, because I’m still processing seventeen things.” The cave doesn’t have this problem. By the time you get there, the letting go has already happened. The hike did it for you. The place did it for you. All the cave asks is that you lie down and notice.

This is not accidental. This is design. And it’s the same principle that underpins every experience we build: the right sequence of places, creating the right conditions, for something to shift that couldn’t shift in the environment you came from.

A yoga studio can teach you poses. A national park can show you trees. But an hour walking through country that has been gathering meaning for millennia, followed by a descent into a limestone cave that once hosted Perth’s most glamorous parties, followed by a practice that meets you in a state your normal life would never have allowed you to reach? That combination does something that no single element can do on its own.

The Practical Bits

Duration: 2.5 hours

Distance: 3.5km (gentle, mostly flat)

Difficulty: Beginner. You do not need to be flexible, experienced, or in possession of activewear that costs more than your groceries.

Location: Yanchep National Park, about an hour north of Perth. The hike begins in the park and finishes at Cabaret Cave.

What’s included: Guided hike through Boomerang Gorge and the Koala Boardwalk, cold-pressed juice, 45-minute guided yoga and meditation in Cabaret Cave, all national park entry fees, stories and secrets about the park’s history, and photos from the day.

What to bring: A yoga mat (we have spares if you forget), water bottle, closed shoes for the hike, and the willingness to spend two and a half hours doing absolutely nothing productive.

Access: Cabaret Cave is not open to the general public. This experience is one of the very few ways to get inside. Which is worth knowing, if only because exclusivity was the entire founding principle of the place, and some traditions are worth honouring.

Book the Zen In The Cave Experience →

The Hike Collective has been guiding people through wild places across Western Australia since 2016. We’ve taken over 25,000 people into places that changed the way they feel, think, and connect, not because we gave them a script, but because we understood that place is the most underleveraged variable in human capacity. Sometimes the right place is a mountaintop. Sometimes it’s a cave that used to be a nightclub. And sometimes it’s the walk you take before you get there that matters most of all.