Thanks for your reply. Being pig-headed I wasn't going to accept the variants shouldn't be there, so after manually creating characteristics in Hikashop I found that by changing the variant product_type in the 'hikashop_product' table from "main" to "variant" I was able to see and edit the characteristics for the imported child products without having to delete and recreate them.
This is the query I used against the database ...
UPDATE `ap_hikashop_product` SET `product_type` = 'variant' WHERE `product_parent_id` > 0
(ap_ is my Joomla database prefix)
I was also able to generate a .csv file with all the characteristic associations and import that directly to the hikashop_variant table to semi-automate the characteristic associations which saved a lot of time over inputting all the products manually.
Ian