pdcawley's solution worked for me under xemacs... you do know that GNU emacs has both cperl-mode and perl-mode?

What is the value of auto-mode-alist? You may be going into perl-mode instead of cperl-mode. Here's sample line that puts me in cperl-mode when opening a test file:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.t$" . cperl-mode)) 
 
(setq cperl-indent-parens-as-block t)
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