  The HI Parkes Zone of Avoidance Survey is a 21 cm blind search with the
multibeam receiver on the 64-m radiotelescope, looking for galaxies hidden
behind the southern Milky Way. The first, shallow (15 mJy rms) phase of the
survey has uncovered 107 galaxies, two-thirds of which were previously unknown.
The addition of these galaxies to existing extragalactic catalogs allows the
connectivity of a very long, thin filament across the Zone of Avoidance (ZOA)
within 3500 km/s to become evident. No local, hidden, very massive objects were
uncovered. With similar results in the north (The Dwingeloo Obscured Galaxies
Survey) our census of the most dynamically important HI-rich nearby galaxies is
now complete, at least for those objects whose HI profiles are not totally
buried in the Galactic HI signal. Tests are being devised to better quantify
this remaining ZOA for blind HI searches. The full survey is ongoing, and is
expected to produce a catalog of thousands of objects when it is finished.
