I do something similar in the CMS that maintain, I have many tests which require a valid user account - and I create that on demand at the start of the tests.

My solution was to created "user.utils" with content like this:

BEGIN { use_ok( 'Yawns::User'); }
require_ok( 'Yawns::User' );
BEGIN { use_ok( 'Yawns::Users'); }
require_ok( 'Yawns::Users' );

sub createUser
{
  ...
}

sub deleteUser 
{
  ...
}
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Then each test which relies upon this:

use Test::More qw( no_plan );

#
#  Utility functions for creating a new user.
#
require 'tests/user.utils';

#
#  Create a random new user.
#
my ($user, $username, $email, $password ) = setupNewUser();

#
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It doesn't solve the problem of repeating code in each test, but it does allow you to put the common code somewhere common even without being able to pass objects around properly.