The archive is a pop, fashion and cultural history and more of what is usually considered the finest and most creative decade of the second half of the 20th century in which Morley was a central player. He took the famous photo of the showgirl Christine Keeler naked and facing backward in a chair which is the iconic photo of the period.
A Los Angeles photography collector, businessman and philanthropist Mr David Knaus, agreed to the purchase over a year ago when Morley sought to tidy up his affairs following the death of his much loved wife Pat.
Part of the purchase agreement, according to Arabella Hayes who has been cataloguing the archive, was that a substantial part of his studio be donated to a UK institution.
She said she was not at liberty to name the institution. The Australian Art Sales Digest understands that The Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London already have a strong representation of his work and are unlikely beneficiaries.
One contender is the National Film and Media Museum in Bradford, Yorkshire although that institution has been under financial pressure from the Cameron Coalition cuts in the UK.
These have resulted in some regional cultural institutions shutting down or selling their collections.
The more affluent Beinecke Museum at Yale University has become the home of the other great sixties collection, the Richard Neville archive sold last year for a modest sum (a low six figure price) after Australian institutions failed to put their hands up for it at an agreeable price.
The Morley collection had been broadly valued at $1 million by Bonhams and Goodman in 2008 when it agreed to take on the sale of the collection. The valuation included potential copyright earnings.
The then managing director of Bonhams and Goodman, Mr Tim Goodman, said that the company ceased cataloguing when it became clear that the frail Morley was tiring of the work involved.
Goodman remembers making some impromptu sales such as one to Elton John who arrived in a stretch limo at Morley's small Leichhardt house eager to buy during one of his Australian tours while the collection was buying accessed.
The project was clearly also becoming obviously very intensive and it was also unlikely to prove commercial. He did have a sale which incorporated some of Mr Morley's private treasures, such as minor works by French Impressionists, in 1987.
Goodman withdrew from the project with reluctance having developed a great liking for the photographer but which, as a memorial service at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium on Monday, is likely to show by the attendance, is widely shared.
Some of this developed over cups of tea and biscuits which Morley and Pat provided visitors to the gallery they ran in the 1980s on Sydney's Parramatta Road.
The Knaus deal means that there is unlikely to be much additional material coming on to what is already a thin market.
But then prices paid at auction will look very historic - as little as $360 for an evocative, better than Everage, Barry Humphries shot have not been unusual.
The early Christine Keeler prints sell for thousands of dollars but vintage versions are mostly in institutions and unavailable to the market.
A digitally imaged Christine Keeler from an edition of seven was recorded as selling for $14,000 ($17,181 with premium) at the Fine Australian and International Paintings and Sculpture sale held by Menzies in Sydney last March.
Coming just as a revival of interest in the sixties through other losses such as David Frost, Morley's death is bound to mean that collectors will look at them once again and take note.
An exhibition was mounted this year at the National Portrait Gallery in London devoted to the Keeler drama in which his material featured strongly. The same institution has - rare for an Australian based photographer - given him a full retrospective.
A victim of his own modesty, Morley said that it was great to come from London to Australia in the seventies (he arrived as a Ten Pound Pom in 1971) because "you had the 1970s all over again."
He was one of the leading chroniclers of both swinging London and of the emerging cultural liberation of Australia during the Whitlam years.
The archive is rich in coverage of the emergence of models and actors such as Susannah York and Twiggy..
In Australia he worked for Belle Magazine but the global impact of the Hong Kong born Morley was through his London years.
As with the Richard Neville archive also intimately covering swinging London in the 1960s, no Australian institution appears to have put its hand up for it.
The man who secured the collection, the Los Angeles based Knaus, appears to be a serial donor of the type known to Australians through Pat Corrigan. They just cannot help acquiring and giving away.
Corrigan and Morley coincidentally were imprisoned in the same POW camp in Hong Kong.
Knaus's name has begun appearing alongside donations of Morley's works to institutions ranging from the Art Gallery of NSW to the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Morley secured rare international exposure when he was the subject of a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
His dealers have included two of the most focussed Australian handlers of photography, Josef Lebovic and Sandra Byron.
