Douglas,

This is my command line:
label_area lh fsaverage lh.temporalpole    

Output:
bash-3.2$ label_area lh fsaverage lh.temporalpole
reading /Volumes/project/fsaverage/surf/lh.smoothwm...
adjusting for group surface area 1.31 (82220 / 62822)
fsaverage:  lh.temporalpole - 512.352 square mm

Thanks,
Jaiashre.