I think that kennethk nailed the diagnosis. Of course, the question now is, are you really wanting an array of references to arrays? If not, perhaps you can describe what you're trying to do and someone can point you in the right direction. I could be wrong, but I suspect that you really didn't want array of references to arrays.

If you're wanting to learn more about multidimensional arrays, you might want to checkout perllol, which is on 'List of Lists' or also known as multidimensional arrays.