HI Bright Galaxies in the Southern Zone of Avoidance

A blind survey for H I-bright galaxies in the southern zone of avoidance (212 degrees less than or equal to l less than or equal to 36 degrees, \b\ less than or equal to 5 degrees) has been made with the 21 cm multibeam receiver on the Parkes 64 m radio telescope. The survey, sensitive to normal spiral galaxies to a distance of similar to 40 Mpc and more nearby dwarfs, detected 110 galaxies. Of these, 67 have no counterparts cataloged in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database. In general, the uncataloged galaxies lie behind thicker obscuration than do the cataloged objects. All the newly discovered galaxies have H I flux integrals that are more than an order of magnitude lower than those of the Circinus galaxy. The survey recovers the Puppis Cluster and foreground group, and the Local Void remains empty. The H I mass function derived for the sample is satisfactorily fitted by a Schechter function with parameters alpha = 1.51 +/- 0.12, Phi* = 0.006 +/- 0.003, and log M* = 9.7 +/- 0.10.