Method returning non-scalar

Is this the way it is meant to be?

-->8-- snip --
use strict;
use warnings;

package Test;
use Qt;
use Qt::isa qw (Qt::Object);

sub a
{
   my @a = ( "Hi", "there" );
   return @a;
}

1;

package main;
use Test;

my $x = Test ();
my @a = $x -> a ();

printf "size=%d\n", scalar (@a);
printf "contents=<%s>\n", $a [0];
-->8-- snip --

The output of the above script is:

size=1
contents=<2>

Seems as if the return statement of sub a is forced into scalar context 
somehow. If this is the intended behavior of PerlQt, it should be 
documented somewhere (in bold capitals ;-) - I could not find anything 
on this. Returning a hash does not work as expected neither. I am using 
version 3.008 with perl v5.8.2.

Cheers, Ole.