Australian singer-songwriter Rowena Wise left the South West for Melbourne 15 years ago. Since then she’s toured Australia, the UK, Europe and North America; next March she plays London’s MOTH Club and Seattle’s Tractor Tavern. Ask where her music comes from and the map folds back on itself — for some journeys only make sense in reverse.

“The scaffolding of who I am as a person and as an artist was built in Western Australia,” she tells me, just over halfway through the national tour for her second album, the indie-folk/alt-rock Bad Things Feel Good*.

That scaffolding was made of timber. Her father, Scott Wise, is among the country’s most respected luthiers, with more than 750 instruments to his name. Wise’s earliest memories are of her parents playing around the kitchen table of the house they built together in Margaret River, of mandolins, guitars, dulcimers and ukuleles scattered through the rooms. And of smell.

“Sneaking into Dad’s workshop,” she recalls, “there was the smell of wood chips and lacquer spray wafting from the back room. And the smell of the wood smoke that he would light to keep the humidity a bit lower.”

By the age of three she was singing three-part harmonies on family car trips. Later came the Wise Family Band, their albums recorded in the kitchen and engineered by her father. Scott made the instruments. Her mother taught her how to play them, and how to sing.

Watching a plank of mostly Australian wood become something fine taught Wise to respect the art of making. “Wood to instrument, to hands, to mind, to art-making,” she says. “The instrument is an extension of the self.”

The new album, some of which reminds me of Beth Orton, of Gillian Welch, of Olivia Chaney, was made at a very different pace. Wise and her band — Richard Bradbeer on bass, Jess Ellwood on drums, Matt Dixon on pedal steel, producer Rob Muinos on guitar — cut 12 songs live over three days and three nights at The Ratshack in Collingwood, then pared them to 10.

There was no time to polish. “That meant letting go of the idea of perfecting anything,” she says, “and just listening to each other’s intuition.” The result has a brittleness at the edges that suits songs about vulnerability, mental health and the slow work of finding out who you are.

Coming home brings its own unlearning. Growing up in a small town, Rowena believed “there’s a great world beyond, and this is a small world right here”. Now she returns with new eyes, “integrating older parts of yourself into the present self”.

She reaches for a half-remembered poem about travel, about understanding home only once you return. Eliot made the same discovery at the close of Four Quartets: the end of exploring is to arrive where you began and know it for the first time.

The wider world has left its mark, too. Barcelona, where Wise spent three weeks last year and played a couple of shows, plus another on Majorca, struck her as a city of rebels, shaped by its history of politics and minorities. “There’s art everywhere.”

Wellington won her over with its birdlife — she loves working out which bird she is looking at on the road — and its people. “They seem very proud of where they live, and very open to showing me around and getting a coffee with me, even if I’ve never met them before.” Two very different climates, she says. The same openness.

Which brings her back to The River Hotel in Margaret River, and to the community that raised her, “the people that shaped me and the people I shaped”. Her father will be in the audience. Might he leap on stage, I ask. “I would welcome that, but I doubt he would do it. I think he wouldn’t want to steal my thunder.”

Wise wonders instead what he’ll feel watching her play a guitar he built. Perhaps, she thinks, “I made that human, and I made that instrument.” Few homecomings carry that kind of provenance.

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Rowena Wise is playing at Mojo’s Bar, North Fremantle, on Friday November 20. Tickets moshtix.com.au. She also performs at The River Hotel, Margaret River, on Sunday November 22. Tickets: theriver.oztix.com.au