I thought I'd share this because it's taken me a couple of hours to work out and the documentation is not entirely clear.
First of all, the purge method used to be called purge in Varnish 2.x but they renamed it to ban in 3.0. Confusingly there is also a new command called purge too! The new purge command is much less sophisticated than ban, as (AFAIK) it only purges exactly matched items, so basically one at a time.
If you do wish to use the new purge you need to have some specific VCL in place. See here