It was the night after the women of Hollywood declared “time’s up” in a globally televised event. The night after the BBC was taken to task about pay inequality. The night after another alleged serial sexual predator was unmasked in Australia. Germaine Greer was delivering a keynote address in Sydney, and the goals were wide open.

The crowd gathered in the Sydney Opera House foyer on Monday could feel it. The crowd that gathered at the New York town hall on 30 April 1971 probably felt the same way.

That night, more than four decades ago, they were there for the infamous debate between author Norman Mailer and feminist figures Diana Trilling, Jacqui Ceballos, Jill Johnston and Greer. It was a chaotic, uneven event but Greer – fresh from the success of her influential book The Female Eunuch – was a standout: engaged, intellectually rigorous and feisty as all get-out.

That evening’s significance is being re-examined in light of the current feminist movement, with a piece by New York experimental theatre troupe the Wooster Group that is currently playing at the Sydney festival. When it opened on Sunday night, Greer was in the audience, cheering on her onstage self from the stalls.

For her keynote speech the following night, the audience expected to hear her reflections on the debate, but we were also hoping for her thoughts on the #metoo movement, the fall of sexual predators, the rise of female activism – perhaps even the beginning of the end of the patriarchy. As Sydney festival artistic director Wesley Enoch put it, Greer is someone who we look to and ask, “What can we learn from our history? And what is our history telling us of our present and our future?”

Instead what we got on Monday night was a 60-minute ramble that skated across the surface of pertinent issues, as Greer played for laughs and relied on generalisations, stereotypes and facile jokes.

Maybe she was having a bad day, but she forgot Emmeline Pankhurst’s name; she offered bizarre rants, such as how germs in the toilet look like refugees; and she kept returning to the correlation between skyscrapers and penises. She spent more time talking about her time in the UK Celebrity Big Brother house than about Harvey Weinstein, and no time on #metoo, Donald Trump or the upcoming anniversary of the Women’s March.

Of course, as one of the most formidable proponents of second-wave feminism, Greer doesn’t owe us anything. As her critic Suzanne Moore has said, “She is Germaine Greer, she can say what she likes.” Across her career, Dr Greer has written on subjects as diverse as Shakespeare, Indigenous issues and her relationship with her father, and she’s working on a new book about environmentalism. Yet she is one of the world’s preeminent feminist academics and, given this event was linked to the reenactment of The Town Hall Affair, the evolution of feminism is what many of us were there to discuss.

Instead she returned to her longstanding argument that aiming for equality for women is a “profoundly conservative goal”; instead women should be aiming for liberation. No one could argue against that – yet Greer didn’t seem to be talking about liberation from workplace discrimination, domestic violence, sexual harassment and abuse, but liberation from cleaning, cooking and depilation. OK, sure, but did she miss the #metoo moment?

Greer did offer some insights into women and creativity, a topic she attempted to interrogate with Mailer at that 1971 event – but on Monday, that discussion was lost in bewildering sidetracks about the Kardashians (“There are things I can learn from them”) and the kind of cringeworthy catastrophising usually voiced by your drunk uncle at Christmas. Greer has long attracted criticism from feminist communities for her claims that transgender women are “not real women”. Now, to the discomfort of the audience, she doubled down, adding her proclamation that transgenderism is a way for men to do away with women altogether: “What if what is really happening is that women are going to get written out of the contract? Women are the people who give birth, but how long will that go on for? When will we have in vitro gestation? It’s around the corner, it’s practically there ... If we didn’t have children, would they even put up with us?”

Of course Greer has always been controversial, to progressives and conservatives alike: the Julia Gillard comments and the defence of female genital mutilation spring to mind. Indeed, fellow feminist Eva Cox, who has known her since they were young, expects no less: “What a lot of people don’t realise about her is that she’s essentially a performer. She was performing, she was trying to be outrageous and she succeeded.”

Given how much Greer has already done to advance the feminist cause, does she have any responsibility to engage with what is going on right now? No, probably not.

In 1971, unlike Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett, Greer showed up to take on Mailer. He wanted a fight and she was ready. But now in 2017, she didn’t appear to be interested in taking part.

We shifted uncomfortably in our seats, longing for the engaged, enquiring, inspiring Greer. As the tectonic plates move just a fraction, we need our academics, our intellectuals, the elders of this movement who have borne witness to the shifts before and can lead us through them again. But on Monday night, it seemed like the woman who has spent her life fighting for female liberation had missed her cue.

• The Town Hall Affair runs at Sydney festival until 13 January