the fry drop off may be due to lack of food. Because they are so tiny they struggle to find food they can eat - or at least enough of it. I learned to add a few things to help provide plenty of stuff to eat.
Do you add a fine filter wool pad to your filter to polish the water? If you do add a dirty one to the tank - it's teeming with microscopic stuff for fry to eat. Add a moss ball, they also harbour quite a lot of infusoria, you can also use it as a feeding spot and use a turkey baster (or similar) to directly squirt liquifry onto it. Another thing is java moss - I tied loads of it to a flat rock and the fry were always feeding from it.
There's also dried leaves. This isn't something I used, it's something I've learned about since but certain leaves can be added to the aquarium and they produce infusoria as they rot down. You can buy them in some fish stores and online or you can wait until Autumn and collect them yourself. I know oak is safe to use (but not black oak), you can use Beech too. Those are the two I can remember but there's loads of info online about the use of leaves and there might be something available in Australia that you can use.
Once my fry got a bit bigger I fed them TetraMin Baby and then once I thought they could handle it I gave them frozen cyclops. Cyclops is tiny - although not as tiny as TetraMin Baby as that stuff is just a fine dust. There's also decapsulated brine shrimp - that's a fine dust too but I found my fry preferred the TetraMin.
Have you worked out what you are going to do with the fry once they grow up? Have you sorted out an lfs that will take them for some store credit?
As to my male - I'm still worried about him. He seems to be frightened of my angelfish. The female used to tell the angels off when she got fed up of them but now she's gone the male is spending his time trying to avoid them. I really wish I knew what to do for him
