Because I came across my own question when I searched on this topic (having apparently given up the previous time) and I am now working on the same problem. I thought I would post my own solution (which I expect deserves to be savaged). So the poor schmuck wrestling with the same problem, has something to reflect on.

For the record I read the suggestions (thanking contributors very much for your assistance). It must have been a bit above my ability to grok apparently. Yes, I may be a dope. For me it's always the syntax that baffles me and I confess I do not completely understand what I am doing even now, yet have to do it anyway.

So here is my solution in part.

use strict;
use warnings;
use SVN::Log;
my $SVNrevs=SVN::Log::retrieve($branchURL, $firstTagRev, $secondTagRev
+);
$i=0; #need this because part the data structure demands it.
foreach @$SVNrevs){
# the easy part
    print $SVNrevs->[$i]{revision}, ",";
    print $SVNrevs->[$i]{date    }, ",";
    print $SVNrevs->[$i]{author  }, "\n";

# This is the pissy bit. Getting the path and the action which are chi
+ldren of the path element (the embedded hash)
    
   foreach my $recordpath ( keys $SVNrevs->[$i] ) {
      for my $path ( keys %{ $SVNrevs->[$i]{$recordpath} } ) {
         foreach my $action ($SVNrevs->[$i]{$recordpath}{$path}{'actio
+n'}) {
      print "\t$action\t$path\n";
      }
      }
    }
    my $message=$SVNrevs->[$i]{message  };
    $_=$message;
    s/\n/ /gi;   #cleaning up random newlines in the message
    $message = $_;
    print "\n\t $message \n\n";
#  }
$i++; #iterate for the next record
}
[download]

Incidentally much of the example code (in the module doc and elsewhere including O'Reilly's Perl books for general concepts and examples, which I rely heavily upon) caused unexpected results (the way I applied it) such as duplicating the array (@SVNrevs) which was unnecessary, and I found the while loop to be tricky to figure out how many times to iterate. I made it work. It may not be elegant, but it's doing the job.

Thanks all for your suggestions which in part finally helped me help myself.