Abstract The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has created a knowledge gap between the Northern and the Southern hemispheres, which is very marked for white dwarfs: Only ≃15 per cent of the known white dwarfs are south of the equator. Here, we make use of the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) ATLAS survey, one of the first surveys obtaining deep, optical, multiband photometry over a large area of the southern skies, to remedy this situation. Applying the colour and proper-motion selection developed in our previous work on SDSS to the most recent internal data release (2016 April 25) of VST ATLAS, we created a catalogue of ≃4200 moderately bright (g ≤ 19), high-confidence southern white dwarf candidates, which can be followed up individually with both the large array of southern telescopes or in bulk with ESO's forthcoming multi-object spectrograph 4MOST.