Indeed, the and was the problem. Even with a newer version installed, and specifically invoked, ant seems to go quite far out of its way to use the older version instead. I had to use --noconfig to get it to stop doing that:
PATH=~/apache-ant-1.9.3/bin:$PATH ant --noconfig -lib lib
Now it works.
But is not actually the version of ant, because if I download 1.7.1 from apache and run it as above, that works as well. It seems to be something that the distributions have done. The distributions I tested where CentOS6.5
and Amazon Linux AMI 2014.03.1 - ami-fb8e9292 (64-bit).
Since it isn't the ant version problem, I don't know what could be added to the README to help people.
Cheers,
Jeff