Great - thanks for your help.
I read the documentation quite carefully and was aware that you need to pass array references. But to someone of my background (biologist with a little self-taught Perl) it wasn't obvious to me that the '->new' method would interpret the @A to provide the array references to generate the object. I suppose I thought it would need something to tell it to look at the contents of @A instead of @A itself. Instead I thought that perl would interpolate the "$var1" first and then the resulting text would be correctly interpreted by the method. I obviously lack some basic understanding here...