The Western Australian government “cherry-picked” Ernest G. Marlow's ideas for soldier settlement, and Sir James Mitchell comprehensively quarried them in 1921 for his group settlement project. Although the earliest settlers came from within Western Australia, the numbers available were insufficient, and Mitchell therefore turned his attention to immigration from Britain. In hindsight, the business model underpinning Western Australia's interwar group settlement was flawed. The story of the original Leeds Group, comprising only 19 families, encapsulates the story of the whole group settlement episode in early twentieth-century Western Australia and also evinces their contribution to the making of a distinctive landscape in remote rural forest and bushland. While typical of group settlers across the State's South West, the Leeds company differed starkly from the majority in one respect. The cohesion of the Leeds migrants owed much to the initial formation of the party in 1923 by Major John Dearman Birchall, one of the city's members of the UK parliament.