Woop! thanks @zogstrip. That works.
I did scour Meta for a solution, and also had a look at the source for the /scripts/discourse but I didn’t see anywhere it said about using the discourse command like that, without bundle exec.
That would appear to have solved my problem, but I would say the discourse command line tool needs a little more documentation, just to get people started. I’m far from a discourse n00b and I can see in the source that the CLI tool has command line --help strings for individual features/switches etc, but it needs to be clearer how to get started - eg that you invoke it without bundle exec.
Once again, thanks @zogstrip
Marcus