Turns out this is actually not a bug in the pylucene package, but rather a result of upgrading from Lucid to Precise. The default-jre-headless package creates the /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk symlink upon a fresh install, but not during the distro upgrade.
Running aptitude reinstall default-jre-headless recreated the symlink and pylucene functions properly now.
Turns out this is actually not a bug in the pylucene package, but rather a result of upgrading from Lucid to Precise. The default- jre-headless package creates the /usr/lib/ jvm/java- 6-openjdk symlink upon a fresh install, but not during the distro upgrade.
Running aptitude reinstall default- jre-headless recreated the symlink and pylucene functions properly now.