The southern night sky is a sight of overwhelming beauty. It is hard to forget one’s first view of the night sky from La Silla with the Galactic centre overhead and the brilliant constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpius with their bright stars and copious amounts of dust. In fact for a millimetre astronomer, it is the dust that is so striking and one feels for the first time that one is seeing tangible visual evidence of the intriguing molecular clouds that dominate our discipline.

Ironically it is the observation of these southern molecular clouds that have shaped much of millimetre radio astronomy, yet we persist in observing them from the northern hemisphere through many air masses of atmospheric attenuation.

Having built the Swedish ESO Submillimtre Telscope, SEST in the south, on La Silla, in Chile, Swedish and other European astronomers would like to follow up this initiative with a southern hemisphere millimetre array, taking advantage of the excellent dry mountain sites. There is much to be done with such an instrument.